


I don't write on empty pages

by SunshineSea



Series: You're not out yet [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Brainwashing, Diverges from ep 155, Elias is a little shit, F/F, Light JM at the end, Lonely!Martin, M/M, Martin is STRESSED, Mind Control, Recovery, Trauma, Web!John, actually contains extended sounds of brutal pipe murder, also Peter has disappeared, we're all just tryna figure out what the fuck is up with our archivist innit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-12-14 13:47:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 27,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21016769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SunshineSea/pseuds/SunshineSea
Summary: John has successfully cored himself to escape the Beholding, and the empty space in his head makes a great nest for the Web.Meanwhile, Martin needs to make some hard decisions to get him back, and those decisions sadly include Elias Bouchard.(Reading the first part of the series is greatly recommended.)





	1. Chapter 1

His dreams have been dark for so long. He is still aware that he is dreaming, in the way only dreamers are, so when he falls asleep in the dark and wakes up in another dark, he is happy. He slips effortlessly from the real dark to the mind-dark and he is happy.  
Now, though, now the dreams are… Fragmented. Hours and hours of peaceful nothing interrupted by starbursts of colour and subdermal fireworks and the unmistakable sensation of _being watched_. He is scared when he falls asleep and wakes up in the colours of somewhere else; the place looks peaceful, but he is still scared. He is scared because he knows that something will happen to him there, and he does not want things to happen to anyone, at any time. He longs for the darkness and weeps when the colours come back. They are assembling, now. They are becoming something. He does not want nothing to become something.

It happens, though. It happens no matter how hard he tries to stop it. The colours first fall into the rough shape of a room, and then the room furnishes itself; shelves, books, desks, chairs, two doors on the blurry walls. He does not know this place but he Knows it, and he is afraid. The edges of everything diffuse themselves in his horror. He tries to wake up. Go back to the dark.

The dream, and whatever is watching it with him, stays put.

He cannot stop himself from walking to the door. His hand goes out against his will and he opens it to a hallway, where the colours are still falling into place to build the floor, and he walks over the not-floor to another door, this one wreathed in red light. There is screaming, but it is distant; yet it fills the hollow of his chest and he cries, halfway wishing to help the screamer, halfway wishing to run away and stay away. His hand turns the knob of the lit door. The dream refuses to end.

God, it’s so _loud_. The screams are so loud. There is a woman in this room and the colours have not bothered to shape anything but her; she is on her knees in the middle, hands caked in retina, awl discarded at her knees; she is not the one watching him because she has no _eyes_, and the remains of them streak her cheeks like gelatinous tears, all pink, all pain, all-

He tries to scream with her in the hopes it might help, but she deafens him, she deafens the world. There is something so primal about it. Deep in the animal parts of his brain dedicated to sleeping and eating there is a ping of social light, like the pack instincts of his ancestors rushing to the surface- he needs to _help_ her, she is screaming because he needs to help, do something, he needs, he needs- oh, but he can’t, because this has already happened somewhere else, to _someone _else. The eyeless woman with her globs of gore does not belong to his pack, not exactly. There is someone else.

There is a ghost in the room. The ghost observes without helping, dressed in a dusty sweater and slacks that seem to hang off his bony hips, with uncombed hair and the beginning of a brown beard. The ghost looks from the woman to the man, then back again, over and over, drinking it in, like he’s _eating _the sight of them. Their pain.

The ghost is a man who looks a lot like him, but the ghost is all eyes.

He wakes up in the darkness. The real one.

His friends can always tell when his dreams turn colourful, and they comfort him with their light, fluttering kisses up his arms, over his chest, down his throat. He sighs and relaxes into the movement of them all; hundreds of friends, all sizes. They melt together into a breeze of tiny feet on his skin. It helps a lot.  
One of them, so large that John can feel its weight on his chest, pecks his lips with its chelicerae and leaves a cigarette behind, which John accepts gracefully. They don’t like his lighter, but they’ve learned to tolerate it.

He inhales deeply in the darkness and imagines what the smoke must look like. He can feel it in his lungs but he’s never actually seen it; his life has been spent in this darkness, with the friends, on top of many layers of spun blankets to make the sleep easier. He thinks he might like to spend eternity right there, but Annabelle has become impatient recently.  
On cue, the big hand comes out of nothing and swipes the friends off his chest. He enjoys the weight of it. It squirms under his back and heaves him up into a sitting position.

“You should do your walking, dear,” Annabelle whispers.

When he first met Annabelle, on the day he was made, he thought she was many different hands. She explained to him between naps that she was actually one thing that the hands were attached to, but John still can’t wrap his head around that. He has only known her as many disembodied limbs that live in the dark. At the start of their relationship she would just use those hands to stroke his hair and hold him through the nightmares, but then she started having ideas. About drinking. Eating. About, ugh, _walking_. She had used those hands to lay him on his side as he threw his water up, and she was very pleased when he was able to keep some of it down. The food had been extremely difficult, though she had made him a slurry of something almost as thin as water, and she said it made him strong. Strong enough to walk.

“I don’t want to,” he replies. He drinks more of the smoke. No, he doesn’t _drink _the smoke, Annabelle had told him this several sleeps ago. He breathes- yes, he breathes the smoke.

“Oh, but you will.”

Annabelle hoists him up with her hands and John can hear the scuttling of his friends as they run away. He is not very good at the walking yet, so they must hide to not be crushed. He grumbles as she spins the ropes around his shoulders to keep him up, and then she ties smaller strings to his ankles and knees, pulling at them from wherever she is to make him jerk around.

“There we are!” she chirps. She pulls his right foot and it moves forward, landing heavily on the ground. He groans and braces himself against the ropes and he tries, he really does. The steps are loud and clumsy, but he tries.

“Come on now, John. Come on.”  
“It hurts.”  
“That is because you don’t do it enough, and because you don’t eat enough. Just a little way more, come on…”

He makes it all the way to the wall and halfway back before she lets him collapse. When she tucks him back into the webs he is about to go to sleep again, but her hands are on his face, in his mouth. He gargles a protest but the food comes anyway.

It’s thin and heavy and feels like concrete in his stomach, but he trusts her when she says it makes him strong. He has stayed awake longer and more often ever since he started eating, so it must be doing something.  
After he swallows, she keeps her long fingers on his teeth to make sure he doesn’t spit, because that is a “nasty habit”. She sounds quite cheerful once she has assured herself that the food will stay down.

“You are doing wonderful today, John. I think we might try listening.”

John’s breath hitches when she says it. When the hands that are Annabelle disappear they go somewhere into the dark where he hasn’t been yet, and he hears the soft _click_ of something that is foreign, but that he has learned to look forward to.

This time it’s only two voices. John tries to lean closer to it. One of them is crying.

* * *

Martin Blackwood never asked for this fucking job. He had asked for an archival assistant position without too many responsibilities because he _knew_ that he wouldn’t be able to do it all, and even then he had just barely managed to pick up enough from experience to keep himself afloat. The contract hadn’t mentioned anything about fighting off supernatural worms and clowns and evil supervisors either, but he had done that, hadn’t he? He had done it well enough to stay alive, at least. Then he had gone out of his way to protect his friends by teaming up with Peter Lukas, and then Lukas had made him go even further out of his way and made him into an assistant, and _then_\- there was really no way to describe how thoroughly Martin Blackwood is drowning in work, because he has been laden with roughly five people’s worth of responsibilities that he, for the record, is in no way formally qualified to do. Predictably, Martin hasn’t been given any assistants.

Every day he spends his lunch break fantasizing about how he’s going to scoop this all up and dump it in Peter’s lap once he returns.  
_Oh, hello, boss! Have a good vacation? I actually don’t care, if I’m honest. I’ve been running my head off trying to patch together this shitshow you left me with, so if you don’t mind, I’d be very happy if you actually did your damn job for once. Yeah, yeah, I’m sure all the spooky mysteries you’re doing are important, but it turns out the Magnus Institute is a real place! An organization, even! In the world! That means there are things to do! Chop chop!_  
Yeah, that’s exactly how it’s going to go. In his head, Martin is winning all the arguments. In real life he’s chewing through a pasta salad and trying not to break down.

To make everything worse, Peter has been gone for way too long this time. Like, way too long. Today actually marks three months since Martin last saw him, and the realization makes his pasta taste even worse. It’s not _weird_, per say, that Peter would just leave. They do have this whole plan about stopping the end of the world and stuff, so he’s probably coming back. He’s always come back before, right? And yet, Martin can’t help the coagulated lump of starch in his throat from growing when he thinks about it, because he has the oddest, most intrusive feeling that, this time, Peter has actually gone. Permanently. And he doesn’t know _what _is giving him that feeling as he leans back and crumples the greasy plastic box of salad in his hands, but it’s too real to be a coincidence. Maybe there’s still enough Beholding left in him to let him just _know_ these things. God damn it.

But if Peter isn’t coming back then that leaves the institute without a head, and Martin is not going to kill himself with paperwork for nothing. Kill himself with other things? Maybe, but Martin Blackwood won’t go down in history as the guy who was found mummified under a heap of unanswered e-mails. He wonders which of the entities enjoy the fear of being a forgotten cog in the bureaucratic machine and dying with nothing to show for it, but he kind of knows. He’s getting very intimate with it lately, after all. He sighs.

He needs someone to step in for Peter. Someone who actually knows how to be the head of anything. He needs someone who already knows about the supernatural to cover the unusual aspects of this place, but who is also organized enough to run the daylight side of things. Bonus points for someone who doesn’t need to be caught up on the whole extinction thing.  
Martin makes an extreme mental effort to not think about other positions the Magnus institute needs to fill. That’s not his job. That’s gonna be someone else’s job when he finds them. He’s not thinking about it.

After lunch, Martin does not step back into the office. He knows who they need, and he supposes he must have known for a while, but just like that other thing (don’t) he doesn’t want to think it. God, why can’t anyone else ever do anything useful? Why is it always _him_ who has to put on the big-boy boots and stare horrible things in the eye? He has to. He doesn’t want to. _He has to_. Peter Lukas is fucking gone and might as well be dead for all the good he’s doing, and Martin is _not_ about to step in as his replacement, so there’s really only one choice left.  
If stuck between Elias Bouchard and a hard place, Martin always figured he’d take the hard place. He zips up his coat and realizes he’s been wrong.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i was planning on posting chapters every third day or something but i am impatient

John is making progress. The ghost in his head is getting stronger but so is he; he can no longer be contained in the basement.

Annabelle spins the webs that keeps the door shut, but she doesn’t know that he can see them, even in the pitch blackness of the cellar. He knows that if he touches the webs then she will feel it, and she will come; and, he suspects, she will punish him. But she is a good teacher and John knows many things that he never officially learned, so when she comes home all tired and bloated, he spins his own webs.  
He makes enough progress to ease her worries, he acts just annoying enough that she doesn’t want to be near him, and he is exactly absorbed enough in the tapes she plays for him. It all comes together with a tug and Annabelle decides to leave of her own, free will. When she closes the door, the webs are weaker.  
He then swallows one of his friends to make the stomach-ache come, so she has to return to coax it out of him. Then he complains enough to make her angry, and after the punishment cools on his skin, he makes the right noises to bring forgiveness. She leaves and comes back, and leaves and comes back, and each time the webs are just a little bit weaker.

She keeps telling him it’s too soon. He’s not ready. He has tried telling her that he’s starving down here but she doesn’t seem to mind, assured that he won’t die. He’s not so sure. He has listened to the people on the tapes on repeat until he sees the strings attaching them, and he is desperate for the satisfaction of spinning; he needs to be out there, he _needs_ it. He needs to see the people. He needs… Something. Something that isn’t here.

He has considered that this might be exactly what she wants. He has decided that he does not care.

After a particularly traumatic event where he accidentally sets fire to a friend with his lighter, Annabelle leaves in a huff and refuses to return. The webs are weak enough now. His heart is still in his throat as he makes his way to the stairs that he cannot see, hands in front of his feet up the steps… The silver fragility of Annabelle’s chains stretches across the doorframe, but they have just enough holes in them for a thin, human hand to snake through, and then his fingertips find cool metal, and then- _click_.  
Oh, how he loves that sound. He keeps his breathing steady as he twists through the hole in the web, every crack of his bones like gunshots in the still air. He fits, impossibly. The last of his limbs contort without touching anything and then, with an unceremonious _thump _of hitting the floor, Jonathan Sims is free.

So.  
This is the world.  
It’s a bit smaller than he imagined, but it’s still exciting.

The world appears to be an unlit hallway. There are doorways without doors going down the hall, and above him, a set of stairs. This new discovery makes him bristle with anticipation; maybe it’s _there_ that the people go when he can’t hear them. He’s gonna have to save it. First, he wants to explore.

His friends have been here, too, and left their little webs in most of the corners of the living room. There are tarps covering most of the furniture he passes, and when he lifts them up he is covered by great clouds of dust, which looks a lot like smoke but doesn’t feel like smoke when he inhales it. He starts ripping them off for the fun of it, and to indulge in the shivers of rebellious exploration. From the living room to the kitchen he goes, pulling tarps and dust and spiderwebs behind him, and he practically dances onto the tiled floor.  
What’s this? A fridge! He opens it and there are spiderwebs!  
Oh, under the cupboards? More spiderwebs! Some pipes!  
In here? Webs! Dust!  
In there? More webs, more dust!  
In here, and there, and under here- and oh, what’s this? A knock at the door? Why-

Wh-

Uhm.

John freezes in his tracks, flakes of dust falling slowly around his head, as he stares out the kitchen doorway and at the door. The knocking comes again. John stares, hypnotized by the noise.  
Then he’s walking towards the door, brushing his hair with his fingers like Annabelle does, slapping dust off his shoulders and chest and even checking his breath at the threshold.  
This is it. A person. Someone has come to see him. Whoo, okay, okay. He can do this.

He opens the door to find a short man in uniform, holding a box. The man looks up from his phone and has a sentence on his lips, but then he sees John, and he just kind of. Stops.

There is a moment of human confusion, but then John sees. He _sees_. The man in front of him is made of spiderlines and hollows and John _sees it_, the strings, the flyaway hairs connecting the postman to the world around him, tied to the edges of memories and emotions that shift and pulse with availability, as if screaming _pick me, pick me. _John’s plan is clear in his head before he even makes it and he shifts, breaks, falls forward into the other man’s arms, knowing he’s going to catch him.  
The man is soft on the inside and won’t run if he is needed. The man wants to help as many people as possible, so John becomes someone who needs help. When the man gasps concerned questions into the top of John’s head he just coughs, clawing, aware that he is bleeding from the head, aware that so long in the cellar has turned him corpse-like.  
The postman panics and is about to lay him down, but John jerks them subtly backwards, and together they stumble in the door of 105 Hill Top Road. In an attempt to regain his balance, the postman grabs for the handle, closing the door behind them.  
The hallway is cool and dark.

John plays his fingers lightly over the man’s heartstrings.  
“You gotta help me,” he whispers, mimicking the stance of someone injured, his voice _almost_ the exact pitch of the postman’s younger brother, from when he was in the hospital with a collapsed lung. He wheezes into the man’s arm and feels his body go soft beneath him, crumpling, leaning, now cradling more than supporting.

“What’s wrong? Talk to me, man, talk to me,”

“It’s… It’s in the basement, I…”

John angles his head to smear blood on the postman’s coat, sinking further and further down to create mock-urgency. The postman heaves him up and John draws a rattling breath, like the breath of his brother, _like the wheezing, coughing, horrifying machine they have him hooked up to, with the straps and tubes going up his nose, down his throat- like the sounds on the other end of the phone when he got that call at work, hissing, “Marco, something ain’t right. Something’s wrong, Marco. The world’s going bad, I got this pain”, like the senseless feeling of guilt at his bedside, both conscious but neither of them speaking, because you should have _been there_, Marco. You’re his older brother. You should have picked him up from practice, you should have been home when he got there, you would have noticed-_

Marco reacts with all the free will in the world, gently putting John down against the wall and turning right around towards the basement door. He casts a glance back and he is not entirely sure what down there can help, but there is something. He knows it. He trusts his brother- no, he trusts this stranger that needs his help, so he walks towards the maw of the cellar.

Only when Annabelle’s long arms reach up from the depths and crushes Marco against her, does John realize the door is open.

* * *

He was told by the guard at the front desk that he needed to wait in the lobby. Then he was told to go into a room with two chairs, a table, and a metal ring bolted to the table for stringing handcuff chains through. After waiting there for what seemed like a very lonely hour he assumed they had forgotten about him (people often do that), but then a different guard promptly entered and told him he was to be escorted directly to Bouchard’s cell. Martin knows very little about jails (he thought jails were for not-so-serious crime and short-time stays, but this is where they have Elias, so?) but even he knows that visits typically don’t happen in an inmate’s cell. Still, he wasn’t about to argue with a police officer about proper conduct, so he followed.

Of course, Elias is too important to be kept with everyone else. Elias gets a cosy little room that is only a cell because of the bars on the windows, with actual rugs on the floor and an armchair and- is that a hotplate? Of course he has a hotplate, Martin thinks dimly. He needs to make his tea.  
In the armchair sits the unmistakable figure of Elias Bouchard, looking… Well, just like himself. Martin had kind of hoped that imprisonment would turn Elias into a shadow of himself, but no such luck. He’s there, as calm as always, not even looking up from his book when the guard locks Martin in. They stand in silence as Elias finishes the page he’s on, and then they make eye contact.  
_Oof. _Now there is a feeling.  
Elias has a pair of extremely dull, grey eyes, the exact colour of an English morning about to turn rainy, with the same unbroken, monotone hue all over. His gaze isn’t exactly piercing in the way one would expect from an all-knowing superbastard, either. It’s kind of… Slipping, almost. Like a hand under the covers that you don’t notice until its cold touch is already on you. During his initial interview, Martin had found that gaze comforting. That feels like eons ago.

Elias smiles and smacks the book shut, apparently not needing a bookmark. _Of course he doesn’t_. The smile he gives him looks real enough, but Martin trusts Elias Bouchard exactly as far as he can throw mount Everest, so that does nothing.

“Hello, Mr Blackwood. I’m glad you finally came to see me. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

Ah, that voice again. The same slipping quality as his eyes, the same wormy little monotone that seeps into your bones when you’re not looking. He uses the exact same inflection as every therapist does when asking you to go on, and damn it, it kind of works. Martin had not wanted to talk to him on the bus ride here. Now he very much wants to.

“Almost a year and a half,” he answers, and feels the crushing weight of how true it is. Sixteen agonizing months of everything going slowly to shit. God, he feels old.

“So it is. And tell me, how have you been?” twinkle in his eye, that bastard. He knows exactly how Martin has been. Martin tells him anyway.

“Not great, to be honest. I really don’t want to talk about it. As in… Really, really don’t. You know why I’m here. Please say you know why I’m here.” _If I have to beg you to return to the institute I am going to chug bleach in the office and get paid for my last, dying convulsions, so help me god._

“No need for that, Martin. I do… Have an idea, of why you’re here.” And for the first time Martin can remember, Elias’ voice sounds just a little bit unsure. It takes him aback.

“An idea? You mean you don’t just Know?”

“I Know a little bit, yes, but Martin… You’re selling yourself short here. Your work with Peter has taken you a great deal further into the Lonely than you ever came with the Watcher. That complicates things in the matter of sight.”

Oh.

“Are you serious?”  
“Yes, I am serious. So, while I would rather not drive you to drink bleach, I do need to be updated on the situation. Peter hasn’t returned?”

“Uh, no. No, he hasn’t. I mean, he disappears sometimes, but this time… I don’t know, I think it’s for real.” And for a second Martin has the childish impulse to ask Elias if he’s correct, like a child asking the teacher for help. He does not, but Elias catches it anyway.

“Yes, I’m sorry to say I’ve had the same suspicions. I can never track Peter properly but he has to come out of the Lonely for air every once in a while, to sneak a victim if nothing else. If he has been terrorizing some isolated countryside these past months, I haven’t been able to find out. Looks like he just…” smirking, and Martin can guess what comes next, “… vanished.”

They stand in silence for a long moment. Martin is trying to collect his thoughts in a manner that isn’t immediately obvious to Elias, and he knows that it’s futile. Whatever power of the Lonely that obscures this man’s vision obviously doesn’t apply to close quarters. He pulls in a deep breath and decides to just go for it.

“So, with Peter gone, the institute needs a head. I haven’t exactly tried, but I imagine that putting out a missing person report on any of the Lukas family is gonna be useless, so… We need someone to do his job until he comes back. If he comes back. And before you say anything, _yes _I was the one who made you leave, and _yes_ I am the one asking you to come back, and it’s all very funny, I am sure.”

“I wasn’t going to laugh.”

“I don’t care, Elias. I don’t care. About anything. I just want to not do this work myself.”

“… Be that as it may, Martin, you do realize I am not a free man. I am-“

“Yes, I _know. _Don’t you have any strings to pull? I’m sure you’ve been digging up dirt on every soul in here for a year and a half, just- just threaten to expose the mayor’s brother as part of a paedophile ring or something and let’s get out of here.”

That was in bad taste and they both know it, but Martin refuses to take anything back in front of Bouchard, and Elias seems to have accepted that he won’t get to gloat right now. He probably knew this was coming the second Peter disappeared and has been spending the time figuring out all his scalding comebacks and self-assured sarcasms. Slimy prick. He gets up and puts the book under his arm, apparently aiming to finish it later.

“Did you have to wait a long time before seeing me?”

“Yeah, almost an hour. Why?”

“Because I already did.”

“Wh- No, you don’t mean-“

“No, _Martin. _The mayor doesn’t even have a brother. But I did, as you say, _pull my strings_. Did you drive here?”

“No.”

“Good, an escort will be easier for both of us.”

And, as on cue, the rustling of keys can be heard on the other side of the door.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it is time to yell at elias "bong" bouchard

He knew, deep inside, what she did with her victims. Seeing it is different. Marco goes limp against Annabelle’s frame in the cellar as she spins her web around him in a tight, _tight _cocoon, and John sees how blank his eyes are. Just wide, wet circles of nothing, set in a face turning rapidly red with blood.

“You did very well,” Annabelle hums, shaping the strings around Marco’s shoes into a complicated knot. John feels a little bit sick, a little bit guilty, and so very, very…

“It was good,” he breathes, voice unsteady with emotion. Annabelle nods.

“What part was your favourite?”

“When he believed me.”

Annabelle grins. Annabelle has many, tiny, sharp teeth.

“The catch is always the best. You spun a quick little web today, John, and you got a quick satisfaction to show for it. Imagine what you could do- what you could _feel_\- with larger webs. Imagine this; what if you had made Marco call an ambulance. What then?”

He thinks as she hangs Marco upside down from the ceiling, swaying gently in his swathe. He never told her Marco’s name.

“He would… Have joined me in the ambulance, so he could be there for me in a way he couldn’t for his brother.”

“Yes. What then?”

“He would have felt conflicted at the hospital because he didn’t spend much time there with his brother. He went to work instead. When he was off work that day, his brother was already dismissed and taking the bus home. It was fine, but he was so afraid it could have been serious, because if it had been then he would have spent precious hours away from the person who really needed him. And then, even though he doesn’t know me, he would have stayed with me to make sure he didn’t make that mistake again.”

“and what would you have done?”

“I would have played along. Made myself pathetic. Thanked him over and over and told him about how I didn’t have any friends or family to speak of, and how the only person who cared about me was my own older brother, who was currently away. I think Marco would have grown to love me by proxy. He would have driven me home in his post car.”

Annabelle grins again. Marco’s mouth hangs open, as if screaming, but the rest of his face is blank as a cliff.

“Exactly. Imagine how it would have felt to bring the net down _then_, after squeezing this man dry of everything he loves. Imagine the moment of sweet, sweet shock as you wrap your arms around him and _push_, sending you both tumbling down the stairs. The last look of confusion before I take him, and drain him, and you get to see all your work come to wonderful fruition.”

John feels his cheeks flush with the fantasy. He takes a cigarette to calm his breathing, and in the momentary flicker of firelight, Marco’s eyes look alive and fearful.

She eats him, then. John doesn’t know how to describe it. He sees her many limbs wrap around his bloated head, he sees her climb onto his swinging form and attach herself to the sticky webbing, and he sees her many, tiny, sharp teeth glint in the embers of his cigarette, but he cannot describe the actual consumption. Her hands just seem to… Sink into him. First into the web and then into him. The last of her elbows move in circles like she’s stirring a bowl and then, first in slow trickles and then in a torrent, blood starts flowing from Marco’s open mouth. Annabelle catches it. She keeps stirring. John watches both horrified and intrigued.  
Then the blood starts thinning and it’s not all blood any more, there’s- _bits_ of something, and Marco’s face goes hollow like something is sucking at his skin from the inside, and the cocoon shrinks and Annabelle drinks and Marco seems to disappear into nothing in front of their eyes.

When it’s done, there is little more than a skin-taught skeleton left. Annabelle drops to the floor with a significant thud, now bloated in her terrible size.

“Hungry, John?” she asks, grinning. John swallows and shakes his head.  
“Oh, come now. It’s not like you haven’t eaten it before.” _It’s thin and heavy and feels like concrete in his stomach, but he trusts her when she says it makes him strong. _John swallows again and then, pointedly, shakes his head. He knows that there will come a time when just the spinning of the web won’t be enough to sustain him, but…  
Not now. Annabelle shrugs.

“Suit yourself.”

* * *

“Martin.”

No, absolutely not. They are not _friends_, they’re not gonna _talk_, Elias is just another employee in this office hellscape and Martin needs him to do his _job. _Anything else will cost extra.

“Martin, we both know the silent treatment is not going to stop me.”

No, no, no. Martin practically runs ahead of him but Elias has long legs, and always seems to be at a rather leisurely pace right next to him. Prison didn’t do him any good. He’s still the same size and height, he still fits those plain suits just fine, his hair is fresh and cut and pomaded back into something that would be described as “professional, yet flirty!” at the cover of a magazine. Elias Bouchard has not taken an ounce of criticism and he has not learned any lessons. Still in control. The insufferable asshole.

“Martin. We need to talk about John-“

Martin swirls on his heels without even thinking, and it’s probably that lack of thought that makes Elias walk right into him. They collide in a decidedly ungraceful manner and, at the sound of Elias’ nose hitting the bottom of Martin’s chin, his chest swells with spite. _Good. Hope it bruises, you twit._

“No! No, in fact, we _don’t_ have to talk about John! What we have to do is deliver a tax statement that should have been in at the beginning of march, that’s what we need to do! And then _you_ need to set up some kind of automatic transfer between us and the book repair shop because the slips that the library stocks are “outdated” now, whatever that means, and Rosie has been up for promotion for _months_, but I can’t figure out how to do that! I’ve been paying her extra out of my own pocket!”

“Martin-“

“We had a plumber in last week to look at the third-floor men’s room and they haven’t been paid, Darla from artefact storage just _stopped showing up_-“

“Martin, listen to me.”

It’s been a good while since Martin let himself just indulge in frustration, but now he does. Now it feels right. Elias made enemies of them, Elias hasn’t _been here_, Elias doesn’t care that Martin has been using his mother’s inheritance to cover institute bills because Elias doesn’t care about anything, does he? No, he’s just a prince in his ivory tower, looking down upon them against their wishes, plotting and planning things he won’t share with anyone, because he’s so bloody in control over everything.

“Listen-“  
“No! Elias “_Bong_” Bouchard, _you _listen to _me_ for once. Peter managed to be you for exactly sixteen months before he fucked right off, and ever since then- even before then- I’ve been you. I’ve been you, I’ve been Melanie, I’ve been Rosie on occasion, I’ve been Darla- I’ve been- I’ve been trying to save the world and balance spreadsheets and keep some _semblance_ of a life, but this place won’t let me! And sure, everyone else can just- t-take off and focus on their own things, but not Martin. Martin doesn’t get to think about stuff. Martin is just that bumbly fat guy in the top office, getting tea for every rando that walks off the street and doing everyone’s jobs for them. Why do you want to talk about John, anyway? Wh- why’s he so _fucking _important? He’s gone! You’ve been gone! Melanie’s gone! Daisy stays awake for three days at a time and then just passes out for fourteen hours on occasion, and who knows what Basira thinks she’s doing, because it’s not _reading bloody statements_. This place is falling apart and I’m the only one doing anything about it, and you know what? I’m supposed to _stop caring_. Can you believe it? That’s my mission; I’m supposed to stop caring for long enough so that the Lonely can make a home in me, like I’m a- a- a sad version of Prentiss. So yeah, that’s doing wonders for my mental health! I’m sure I’m going to live a very happy, healthy life until my heart gives out at thirty!”

Elias, to his credit, does listen. He has managed to steer them the rest of the way to the office and shut the door while Martin rattles off on, as to avoid public scandal. Always the practical man. Always the rational. He looks grave and concerned when Martin meets his eyes, and then changes his tune immediately when Martin lets him know that is the entirely wrong expression to have.

“Your heart won’t give out at thirty,” Elias states, as if that was the one thing that mattered in everything that was said. It baffles Martin just enough to make his anger blow past him.

“Wh- What?”

“You won’t die of a heart attack when you’re thirty, Martin.”

“Oh, now you know how we’re going to die?!” anger again, and it feels so good, so warm-

“No, I don’t. But you can’t die when you’re thirty because you’re _thirty-one_. Your birthday was two weeks ago, Martin, didn’t you get my card?”

Martin doesn’t know what to think, so he doesn’t. He has a vague understanding that the subject has just been thoroughly changed, but the anger seems to have seeped right out of him, along with everything else. He just feels kind of empty.

Empty is good. He likes empty. Empty is when the Lonely comes for him and he lets it in, leaves the door to his head open and just… Allows everything that wants in, to get in. Allows everything that wants out, to get out. When the emptiness paradoxically fills him, he finds it so easy to just let the breeze blow through his corporeal form, and then it’s not corporeal anymore; there is no one standing in front of Elias Bouchard.

Elias stays in place for a while to see if Martin pops back into existence, but he doesn’t. With a sigh of both relief and pity he enters his old- no, just _his_ office, where he belongs. It’s strewn with papers and post-it notes and almost everything is labelled “for Peter” in increasingly unstable writing, but Elias reaches beneath them all, hand drawn to the things the Beholding wants him to know.

There, under an unprocessed HR complaint, is a small envelope with his own handwriting, delivered on Martin’s birthday. It’s unopened, but Elias remembers what he wrote.

_To Martin,_

_I hope you enjoy your birthday. I trust I shall see you soon, maybe sooner than you think._

_Elias._

It feels heavy in his hand.

The next time they see each other, Elias actually knocks on the inside of his own office door, so that Martin (right outside like a good lapdog) can choose whether to see him or not, and honestly? That is genuinely appreciated. He sighs and clenches a fist around his pen, as if the discomfort can make him more corporeal. If Elias is playing nice then Martin won’t be a dick about it. They can be civil, surely.

Elias opens his door and stands in the doorway. Martin sits at his desk, completely present and physical, with all the bones and blood and stuff that human bodies need to have to be present in the world. He remembers Peter once telling him that becoming invisible was a piece of cake; it was the act of returning to the harsh, physical world that was difficult, and he is starting to understand that. Still, he’s here now.

“Do you…” Elias begins, holding the end of the “you” until Martin huffs and meets his eyes, “… want to know what is going on?”

The question somehow inspires dread and excitement all at once.

“Do you…” Martin answers, holding the end of the “you” exactly as long as Elias had, annoying everyone and achieving nothing except a sense of childish satisfaction, “… want to tell me?”

“I would _love_ to tell you, Martin. I have taken your criticism to heart and decided to be more open with you. Would you like to come inside?” and he steps away from the doorframe with a hand on the knob, wearing that somewhat-muted-yet-amicable smile that he used to put on before they all knew he was a monster. Martin _stares._

“Are you mocking me?”  
“No, I'm not. I really did listen to you yesterday. I know we’ve had our differences-” Martin interrupts him with a started laugh but Elias presses on, “- some of which have been _severe_, yes, but whatever the case, you are still an employee. I am still your supervisor. We all have our jobs to do and, right now, this is mine. Please step inside.”

Martin can’t tell if the “please” is hiding some kind of supernatural command, but he gets up from his desk and does what he’s asked. Elias Bouchard, volunteering any kind of information? Why, it’s too good to pass up, isn’t it?

Elias’ office is as modern as anything can be in this decrepit old building. The old brickwork has been wallpapered over in a tasteful grey except for the back wall, which is left bare to add a dignified, rustic accent to the whole room. Hip-height bookcases line the left and right walls to let the windows stream sunshine in uninterrupted and, in the middle, with two leather chairs and a safe underneath, stands a desk of glass and steel. Elias sits down behind it and motions for Martin to take the other chair. Among the neatly organized papers stands a plastic tray with two teacups, a tiny pitcher of milk, and a little bowl of sugar cubes. When Martin sits down he sees that the cups are already filled; his cup brims with the dark-purple of blackcurrant, while Elias has a cup of something almost black. The steam rises calmly between them.

“Tea?”  
“… Yeah, I guess.”

The bowl holds exactly the amount of sugar that Martin usually takes with his tea. He tries not to think about it as he stirs.

“… So?” he asks over the brim of the cup, allowing himself a pure moment of fleshy pleasure as it warms his hands.  
“So?” Elias replies, not touching his own cup.  
“So.” Martin answers.

They sit. Martin sips. In another life this silence would bother him, but silence is one of the few friends he has left in the world, now. If Elias wants to tell him something then Elias can get his finger out of his ass and do so; Martin is beyond begging for scraps of knowledge.  
So they sit. They sit in the gentle fragrance of blackcurrant and breathe each other’s air and Elias watches and Martin makes a point of not watching, not knowing, not really caring about where this meeting is headed, even though he very much does. The atmosphere is oppressing and non-committed at the same time, which is probably why Elias finally clears his throat, having realized he needs to start the conversation. Sadly, Martin has stopped initiating things long ago.

“I think we need to start somewhere fundamental. I assume that, by now, you have realized there is a sort of hierarchy to the way the Watcher operates, yes?”

Martin nods. Sips. Doesn’t encourage him.

“Our patron- yes, it is still your patron too- is one of the few entities with a love of structure. A rather rigid one. I am at the top as the Head of the Institute, no surprise there. Below me there is supposed to be a Detective, someone whose hunt for knowledge takes a more practical form. Someone to meet witnesses, someone to corral the archival staff into formation, hunt the monsters, that sort of thing. Every position is in relation to organization. Do you follow?”

Martin nods again, but then he stops and thinks.

“Who is that?”

“Well, I’ve never had an actual detective myself. For a while it looked like the Watcher had singled out Basira for the role, but she has been… Uncooperative. My predecessor, James Wright, had one named Adelard Dekker, though I never had the pleasure of meeting him. I think you know of him?”

Martin shivers through the seeping heat of his tea and remembers Dekker’s statement about the funhouse mirrors, but all he gives Elias is another nod.

“Well. Below the Detective is the Archivist-“

It feels like a physical blow to the head and Martin bites down hard on the inside of his cheek, feeling his molars dig into the soft flesh of his mouth until there’s copper on his tongue. They are not talking about that. If Elias pulled him in here to talk about- no, don’t even think his name, they are_ not _talking about that.

“- and below the Archivist there are assistants. Three, usually, though it is by far the least rigid position to have. In my own experience, the assistants often do the same thing as the Archivist does, just to a lesser extent. In the eye of the Watcher, they are simply extensions. _Spare limbs_, if you want.”

Martin does not want to think of himself as the Archivist’s spare limb, but if it shifts the conversation away from the empty position then he’s happy to nod along.

“Of course, there are other titles. The Librarian, the Keeper, the Crofter, the Greeter- all come together to form a pleasing flowchart under the Watcher, all bound to serve it. We are not the only temple, and each location have their own configuration of these same, base roles, tailored to fit the needs of a particular place. I believe our sister foundation in America has four Librarians and only one Assistant, while our friends in China has no Greeter. I don’t think any temple has had a Crofter in recent memory. In that way, the hierarchy is malleable to an extent; the only constants are the Head and the Archivist, also known as the Heart and the Sense. Without these two roles, the temple falls apart. I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

Martin has noticed. He is, in fact, still noticing. The crumbling walls and broken mirrors, the heating pipes and water pipes and air conditioning, the damp carpets and limp curtains and unmistakable scent of rot in every breakroom fridge. He figured it was a simple issue of maintenance, but… Of course, it’s not. Of course. No, nothing can be simple, can it? Nothing can ever just _be like it is _without actually being the revenge of some ancient god, can it? He closes his eyes and sips his tea, refusing to look at the specks of blood now lining the edge of his cup. He nods again.

“Martin, I know this is a lot, and I know the silence is very comfortable for you, but I do actually need a verbal confirmation on this. Do you understand the roles, and how important they are to the structure of this place?”

“Yes. I get it.”

“Good. Thinking of this place as a body will be helpful to you, so keep that in mind. Also… Please speak to me, Martin.”

Martin is a little taken aback by the sheer _honesty _of Elias’ words, and when he looks up he does not find the smug satisfaction of an intellectual getting to show off; he finds a pair of flat, concerned, grey eyes, and a pair of pupils that seem to be searching for something they can’t find.

“Why?” but he can guess why the second he asks, and he allows himself to glow with pride for a second. Elias wants him to speak because Elias is having trouble just staring into his soul like he usually does. Oh, how wonderful. How delectable. It puts him in a downright cheerful mood.

“Because-“

“You know what? I think I know why. And sure. So… You’re the heart, because without you we all die. Then below you would be the Detective who is like the hand, doing practical things. The Archivist-“ _don’t-_ “-is the sense, or senses I guess, because they’re supposed to be perceiving everything. The assistants are limbs that extend the Archivist’s senses out into the world and gather more of it.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“Let me take a crack at the rest. The Librarian is, uh… Stomach, I guess? There to store information?”

“Well, not exactly. If we stick to the analogy then the stomach would be the Keeper, currently Darla, in artefact storage. The stomach is there to contain and _break down_, to put up barriers against the danger. The Librarian is… Well, it’s not a perfect analogy. I suppose the skin, or the flesh. It’s where everything eventually ends up once the organs are finished with it.”

“Okay, sure. The Greeter- oh, that’s Rosie! And she’s the mouth of the whole monster, there to pull people in. Ugh. Does she know?”

“She does not, and she will not. Rosie frequently scores the highest of all our employee satisfaction surveys and it is in my interest to keep her happy. She is excellent at what she does.”

Martin feels a twinge of guilt, but for once in his life he can see Elias’ point.

“… Then… Elias, what am I?”

The words rattle out of him in a rush of breath. He does not know how much he sounds like John in that moment; he was not there when John pleaded for Elias to tell him what it meant to be human, and the Beholding does not see fit to share it with him. Elias, however, seems for a moment to be genuinely sad. The memory echoes between them when he answers.

“You are interesting, Martin. I don’t think you are an archival assistant anymore. Do you know I had you down as a potential Archivist back before the Unknowing? You’ve taken quite well to the statements, if I remember correctly? But your leaving your position and moving up without a formal promotion has made me realize that the structure is less rigid than I thought, and now… Well, I think it will please you to learn that I actually don’t know. When you became Peter’s assistant you shifted the hierarchy ever so slightly. Your position is a completely new one.”

“What, none of the other institutes have an assistant?”

“Not to the Head, no. And you’re selling yourself short again. You have been much more than just an assistant.”

“… Then, what? I just have to figure out my own role? Where I fit? What I do? And don’t say “keep doing what you’ve been doing” because I will-“

“No, no, I don’t think the Beholding wants you to fill any position you can fit into. I think- and keep in mind, this is only a theory- but I think that, in this body analogy we’ve created, you act like a brain stem.”

“… And the brain is?” Martin asks, but he feels the chill of already knowing.

Elias smiles and slowly points up.

The following silence is so pregnant that Martin feels glued to his chair. This means something, something major, but it also feels strangely private, in a way that makes Elias’ saying it almost offensive.  
He did it, he realizes, not sure how to feel. Martin quit his job. Obviously he just moved up in the same organization but- he is no longer an archival assistant, right? So he kind of quit. That feels like the nature of things, doesn’t it? Once something ancient and evil takes a fancy to you, you belong to it forever, or until you manage to twist yourself into something new and unknown and still-doomed, but different. It feels good to have that option, at least.

“I think I get it,” he mumbles.  
“Doesn’t matter what else I do. I’m still gonna be here, aren’t I? I could be deep in the other- uh, fears, or whatever, but I’m still gonna be _here_. It just doesn’t let go.”

Elias folds his hands again, face set in something neutral with a pitiful touch.

“You are correct. We are all going to be _here_, Martin, for as long as we can serve. I do not know what, if any, responsibilities or abilities your new position will grant you. Only time will tell. I hope you can trust me enough to tell me if you start changing. That being said, there is another reason why the hierarchy is so important for you to understand, Martin.”

“Yeah?” stirring his tea now, bored.

“… And before I say it, I want to ask you to please keep your composure.”

He looks up, suspicious, teaspoon now clenched like a weapon.

“… Yeah?”

“I mean it. I can tell you’re not going to hold together if I tell you this, but I need to yell you this. Please try to stay level-headed.”

“I’m listening?”

Elias takes a deep breath.

“John isn’t dead. “

Oop. Nope. Gone. Martin does _not _keep his composure; in fact, he keeps it so badly that he disintegrates from existence itself and completely disappears, popped from the real world with all its conflicts and into the Lonely where nothing matters. Elias bangs a fist on the table and does not try to contain his frustration.

“Martin!”

Oh, but Martin isn’t there. Martin is somewhere where no one can touch him. In the room, yes, and technically in the same dimension, but not _there_. The air pushed by the aircon slowly moves through him. He can hear Elias, but the words don’t reach him.

“Martin, you’re not going to leave.”

Really? Watch this. Martin shifts his thoughts from the physical spot on the chair over to the nothingness encompassing the door, fully intending to drift through it and back to work. Elias’ office door has a small, round window on it with a single, horizontal bar, cutting it into two half-circles, like the lids of an-  
The eye opens. Martin is Seen.  
He comes crashing down under his own weight and hits the floor, hard enough to make his skull bounce on the floorboards.

When his vision swims together into coherency again, Elias is kneeling next to him, turning him on his back with an effort. Strands of his meticulous hairdo are starting to unfurl and stick to his forehead, red and sweaty with effort, pupils blown wide as doors.  
“You need to-“ Elias grunts, forcing Martin to face him, to look into those monochrome eyes,  
“You’re _going to _stop doing that, do you hear me?” and he grabs Martin’s face with both hands to hold him in place. Keep him corporeal. His chest is proper heaving, Martin notices.

“I would _greatly prefer_ if you did not make me do that again. You can hide from people, Martin, and to an extent you can hide from me, but you can _never_ hide from our master. It is an extremely bad idea to try.”

Martin chokes an agreement through the pain. Elias gets up on one unsteady knee, but he falters and lands heavily on his hand. _He’s getting weaker_, Martin realizes, aided by the blast of Beholding he just endured. _We’re all getting weaker. _They stay silent as they both recover their dignity_, _and soon enough they are back at the table, looking a little dishevelled but overall composed. Elias pulls a shaking hand through his hair and makes everything fit back into place.

“I know…” Elias begins, but he has to stop and massage his eyelids for a second.  
“I know John is a painful topic for you. _I know. _And I know Peter’s training has conditioned you into running from this kind of confrontation. Trust me, I’ve been working with that man for years. But please just listen to me, because what I am about to tell you might save our lives. All of our lives.”

Martin nods, still bleary-eyed from the impact. Somewhere in the room, a tape recorder clicks on. It’s a comforting noise.

“You listened to his statement.”

Oh, the urge to disappear again is almost too much to fight. Yes, Martin listened to the statement. He listened to John’s crackling, weak voice as he explained Melanie’s screams and the aftermath; the self-digestion, the cannibalism, the slow decline of his abilities, until the line separating death and freedom broke, and he was found by Daisy and Basira, braindead in his office. They had not intended for the tape to reach Martin but something else clearly had. It had just been at his desk one day.  
He remembers going down to the archives with every fibre of his being begging him not to and finding it empty. He had opened every door, every drawer, looked through every paper he could get his hands on, desperately trying to swallow down the panic that threatened to consume him, because _John was not there_. John _had _to be there. He couldn’t leave anymore! The only way out of this place for someone like him was-  
He remembers the two of them coming in, then, ashen-faced and snow laden, and how the grief had warped Daisy’s voice when he shouted at them to tell him what was going on. She had gotten quite mad at him, actually. Told him to leave John alone. Told him that John was as good as dead, and whatever else he might have become didn’t matter anymore; the man they knew was gone and his body was being used by the Web and that was that. She had screamed something about manipulation (“Do you know how it feels?! Do you?!”) until it became too much for him, and he had fled like the coward he is.  
When he found Basira on her own she had been calmer than Daisy, but she hadn’t volunteered anything else.  
_John is dead. Gone. He got out of here. Let him have his peace. We should be happy for him._

“John is _not _dead, Martin.”

Martin closes his eyes. Elias keeps going.

“The rules of the hierarchy are hard to understand sometimes. I’m not even sure _I_ understand them completely, especially not after you became… Whatever it is you are now. But I know that the same force that prevents you from quitting also prevents me from filling positions that aren’t needed, and- look at me, Martin- _I can’t hire a new Archivist_. I physically can’t. That means John is still out there, and whatever remains of him is _still _the Archivist, and without the Archivist at their post, the Magnus institute is going to keep declining.”

_Good, _Martin thinks. _Let it fall apart._

Elias makes a noise of frustration.

“You’re not _listening, _Martin. The public serves us and we serve the public, and together we all serve the ceaseless Watcher. If we _stop, _if the institute can’t fulfill its purpose, then we are going to die rather painful deaths, and the public is going to suffer for it. We don’t just catalogue our information; we act on it! We use it to stop the less passive forces that threaten to destroy the world as we know it! How do you think life would look if we hadn’t been here for the Unknowing? And every time some poor soul comes through these doors to unload their misery, a little bit of the Beholding follows them home. There are many things out there that hate to be watched, Martin. Our watching keeps them at bay. Our watching stands between _being _and _unbeing_. We are the fingers of sunlight that pull apart the darkness; we are the lantern. We light the way. If not for us, there will be nothing to find for the ones that come after.”

He sounds quite religious when he says it and Martin reckons it should scare him, but there is something very warm about hearing it. It’s nice to be in a world where people can still believe in things, even if they are in service to an ancient brain-eating god. He turns around to look at the window in the office door and has the feeling that whatever is watching him through the glass agrees.  
When he turns back around Elias has leaned in, both palms down on the desk. His reflection is crystal clear in its surface.

“Our patron is not a patient thing, Martin. We need to find John and we need to find him fast; either to put him back where he belongs, or completely sever him from his position. This in-between will be the end of all of us, if we let it.”

He Knows that it is right.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for worms  
also
> 
> (martin voice) KEITH?!

The night after Marco dies, the ghost comes back for John.

It’s not the eyeless girl this time; he finds himself in a room he both does and does not recognize, next to a man he definitely does not, and the only thing that matters is the pain. _The pain_. The pain of many, tiny maws, drilling many, tiny holes in him, the heat of their fat bodies squirming into sloughing skin, the vibrations in his skeleton as they burrow and _hit, _dip, and move on- He feels every inch of every one of them making their way, and their home, in between the spaces of his tendons. He cannot move to stop the worms. He lies still on his back and stares, and feels, and if he could scream then he would, but his body remains unresponsive.

One of the bodies crawl across his cheek and slips into it, leaving no blood behind. It bangs against his teeth and squeezes into the space between gum and bone. Another follows but this one goes higher, and, when it has bitten a hole in John’s closed eyelid, it changes its mind and rolls off, leaving him with ragged-edged vision on the right side.

That is where the ghost is. It looks a little bit more like a man now.

It leans over him, though John can’t help but notice how it doesn’t _loom_. The ghost is short and so rail-thin it looks like a good gust of wind could blow it apart. The parts of its face that is not eyes look a little better, though; there’s more colour, more fat, like it has enjoyed at least one good meal since the last dream. It watches his passive pain with all of itself. Hungry. John gets the undeniable impression that it is _starving_.

He wakes up in his new bedroom and is surprised by how well-rested he feels.

Annabelle moved him to the second floor after he caught Marco for her. As a reward, she said. She did not care about how little he wanted to leave the humid safety of her darkness. It is so strange to wake up to the sunlight and birds, and it feels lonely without his friends, but he supposes the little room has a charm of its own; the walls are painted a pleasing blue and he has his own wardrobe, which Annabelle has stocked with clothes. Many of the clothes have signs of wear already on them.  
He does not ask who they belonged to, or why it feels so nice to wear a stranger’s smell.  
The bedroom is a lot colder than the cellar was, and there is a coat in the wardrobe that he would love to put on, but when he gets out of bed there is a bright yellow note on the door that says “Step two: dress”, and he has not yet completed step one, so he can’t.  
Step one is on the bathroom door. It says “hygiene”. He enters and finds another note on the mirror, saying “brush teeth, comb hair”. The brushing part is easy (just scrub, rinse, and spit blood for the friends in the drain), but the combing of his hair needs him to look in the mirror, and he dislikes that.  
The man in the mirror, who John knows to technically be himself, looks too much like the ghost for comfort. He combs quickly.

After following the notes’ instructions to trim his nails and shave, he exits the bathroom and finally gets to dress. The coat is warmer than he thought it would be. Too warm. When he turns back to take it off and hang it in the wardrobe, there is a note on the inside of the door, saying “Go outside”.

Annabelle has not told him what he would be doing today, but he has a feeling it’s going to happen just the way she planned it regardless.

John has never been outside before. He’s sure of it.  
He was made to be in Annabelle’s basement, and everything he knows is from her, and she never taught him how to navigate Hill Top Road, or how to get to the bus stop, or how to ride the bus, or- but she _must_ have, because John finds himself able to do all these things as easily as he combed his hair. There are _people_ on the bus and John has fantasized about_ people_ since he realized he existed in Annabelle’s arms, so why do none of them interest him? He can see the strings waving in an invisible breeze from their bodies; their minds intricate and simple at the same time, their pasts and futures colliding within them to create the current. He could reach out to them. Touch them. He could pull their strings to make them see him, talk to him; he could take them back home and finally allow Annabelle to teach him how to eat.  
He could.  
He does not.  
Instead, he sits on the bus and stares out the window, as cold and distant as every Londoner on public transport is.

The café that he has never been to but recognizes immediately is a tiny place, wedged into the corner of two apartment blocks. The brown lettering on the big windows reads “It’s a brew-tiful day!” and is accompanied by a little drawing of a french press. At this point, Annabelle’s directions leave him. He goes in, unsure of what else to do.

When he is sat at one of the round little tables with a steaming cup in front of him, John starts to feel abandoned.  
This is… Well, it’s not right, is it? This whole affair. Did he offend her?  
No, no, she was very happy with Marco. Right?  
Right, because she said she was, and when she has been unhappy in the past, she would just hurt him. She’s never _thrown him out_ before.  
Oh god. Has he really been thrown out? He pours a cardboard tube of brown sugar into his coffee to watch the foam pop, vaguely aware that he won’t like the taste of it. Annabelle probably has a plan with this. She has to have. Maybe it’s a test. Maybe this is that “real world experience” she was talking about, and he’s supposed to be out and about getting to know people and their weaknesses, instead of sitting paralyzed in a café with a cup he’s not going to drink from.

This is stupid. Being directionless is stupid. If she wants something from him then she either has to tell him or make him do it, just dropping him off in the middle of familiar nowhere accomplishes nothing. The foam in his cup has completely disappeared, leaving a smooth, blank, onyx surface for him to study.

“John?”

He almost screams.

There is a woman next to his table and he does not know her, but the sight of her, it-  
She is taller than him, broader than him, with a calm about her strings which reaches her core. Her skin is a beautiful and untouched expanse where his is a pockmarked mess. He does not know why he notices these exact things about her, or why it makes him so self-conscious, and he doesn’t know _why _she feels-  
Why-

She sits down and he’s still staring at the air where she was.  
He forces his head to point in her general direction and absorbs the deep-set worry in her eyes that almost (but not quite) shakes the foundational calmness in her, and he _knows her_.

“Georgie,” he whispers. His voice sounds older than he’s used to. Croaking and deep with cigarette smoke. When he says it he knows it’s her name, but he does not know her.

“Oh wow, John,” she answers, flawless hands reaching over the table.  
“John, you look… You look great!”

This can’t be happening. He feels for the comforting strings that tells him Annabelle is there to help, but they aren’t there. It’s just him. Him, John, and her, Georgie, whose mere existence on the same plane as him makes him dizzy. There’s a headache coming on now, and he knows it’s not the coffee, there’s…  
It feels familiar, but threatening. Like something on the outskirts of his memory banging on his skull to get in. It feels a lot like seeing the ghost in his dreams.

“Do I?” he asks sincerely, running a hand over his freshly combed hair. He has no notion of how else he would look, or why it would be better than anything else, though… The fact that she thinks it makes him feel important, somehow.

“Yes, you look… Healthy. Like you’ve been sleeping.”

She doesn’t laugh but he does, a little too loud and obviously nervous. He fixes his hair again. _What the fuck is going on._

“Yeah, I guess I have been. Though, I didn’t think me getting sleep was going to be enough for you to talk to me, after…”

Oh, there it is. The headache breaks and he sees it, now, painted plainly on her face; _you have to stop doing this. I want to help you, John, I really do, but- I’m not going to kill myself over it. You have to try to help yourself._

“Sure it is. Jonathan Sims getting a good night’s rest is news material.”

_You’re not trying, John! No, you’re not! You keep saying you are but then I find you back in this hole, reading statements to- to appease a god, or whatever! You’re pushing everyone away and it’s like you don’t even care as long as you get your- your daily snack of trauma!_

“I… I guess you’re right. You know, lately, I’ve started to realize you were right about a lot of things.”

_Some people just take and take and take until there’s nothing left of you, and I’m not going to be your emotional battery. When you actually want my help, you can talk to me. If you’re just going to keep pretending to want my help then I can’t be friends with you anymore. That’s just how it is. No, I’m putting my foot down. I’m sorry._

That seems to be the exact right thing to say. Georgie takes her bag out of her lap and hangs it on the chair. She takes her coat off. Had John been a normal, mortal, untouched-by-Web kind of man, he would still have been able to read the signs that she is planning to stay.

“Yeah? Go on.”

“Well, I mean… You know…”

“Yeah, I know. But I wanna hear it. This sounds like it’s going to be an apology.”

“I…” He huffs, but turns it into a defeated laugh at the end. The words that come out of his mouth next do not belong to him _or _Annabelle; it is something new and old and raw and feral, sourced outside them both.

A truck stops outside the window behind Georgie, and in the sudden darkness of the surface he can see a shimmery image of himself; filled-in, flush-faced, and almost all eyes.

“I got out, Georgie.”

His hand goes up to push the glasses back into place but instead it sneaks under them, pressing down hard on both of his eyelids until the darkness shifts and tilts. He- He cannot _remember_, exactly, because it didn’t happen to him, but- he _knows. _He _sees_. He feels the buckling of his _legs in the break room, the rush of air and then the pain as he falls forwards into the sink. The edge of it hits him right in the ribs. His hands shake so violently when he tries to get up that his tendons dance beneath the skin, but he still, somehow, finishes the teacup he was making. He does not carry it back to the office. Too risky. If they saw him spill- if, god help him, if they started to suspect-_

Looking at Georgie is so much easier than looking into the reflection of himself behind her. Her lips are a little parted, her head a little tilted, and even though John can _feel _how much she wants to care about him there is still a well-deserved wall up between them. She wants him to be telling the truth. He thinks he is, it’s just not _his_ truth.

“You… What, you quit your job?”

“I… Yes. Yes, I think I did.”

“Okay? John, don’t get me wrong, but, I… I thought- you told Melanie the only way out was to be _blind_, John, and you’re not, so-“

“I know,” and in that moments he knows a lot more than he wants to.

_The woman without eyes, her chains reduced to red-stained gelatine on her cheeks, her chin, fingers glinting wet in the flickering office light- the master is unhappy with her, but she does not know. He, the ghost, stares. He, John, stares. He files the memory away somewhere where it will haunt him. She is Melanie. Melanie is blind. Melanie is free. He saw her free herself and she screamed and she screamed- he wrapped her head in bandages while waiting for the paramedics and his hands were wet afterwards. She could not hear him when he cried, and she could not Know.  
He was so worried. He was so afraid. He was so venomously jealous._

“What I did, Georgie, it was… Worse. And it wasn’t an option for Melanie.”

Georgie’s eyes narrow.

“Let me guess- you’re not going to tell me?”

He can tell she’s disappointed, but when he tries to dip back into those foreign memories there’s so much _breath going slow, going steady, feels like drinking the air rather than breathing- feeling his coat growing tight over his belly as he feeds on himself, slowly, losing his ability to tell time, struggling with standard maths, trying to do magazine puzzles to keep some of it intact and it’s not working- being unable to walk further than a few steps, deciding to sit down, deciding to not get up, wondering who will find him-_

“I want to, I do, but… I- it’s like a bad dream. I remember it hurting, I think? And it took so long, so very long. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I can’t.”  
_at least he couldn’t care anymore towards the end. He just put his feet up on the desk and stared into the ceiling and enjoyed the silence, thoughts slowly flickering out of existence in the back of his brain. He couldn’t remember every feeling so full before, and it was a good feeling. It was good until it was nothing. It was nothing until Annabelle shaped it into something._

Georgie scans his face, but then she nods.

“I believe you, actually.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. I mean, you’re still going to tell me how you did it one day. You know what would help you remember, and probably help a lot of other stuff?”

“No?”

“Therapy, John. You should go to therapy.”

She has a look on her face like she’s daring him to argue, and he can’t. Obviously he’s not going to go; he probably has some kind of mission that Annabelle isn’t telling him about, and he can’t be derailed by things like maintaining his mental health, but Georgie is just a person. She has strings attached, like everyone else. He reaches and pulls one of them.

“I am, actually.”

Her eyebrows shoot up.

“Wait, really?”

“Yes! Is that so hard to believe? I’ve always had access to a counsellor through the Institute, so it wasn’t hard to find her again after I quit. It…” he waves a hand. His reflection does not.  
“It doesn’t feel like it’s doing anything, to be honest. I’ve never seen the point.”

He sounds like himself and Georgie notices, a tiny smile finding its way onto her face.

“Then why do you go?”

“I guess… It just feels like something you should do? And I’ve been told that I can’t expect things to get better overnight, so I should just keep showing up as an act of-“ he furrows his brow like he’s trying to remember someone else’s words, “-self-care? Which, I’ve also been told, is something I need to be doing.”

Georgie is outright grinning now.

“What else did your counsellor tell you to do?”

“Well, I don’t know if you know this, but there’s a thing they call _eating things that are real food_. I’ve been getting into that. Oh, and sleeping sometimes. Did you know other people sleep for _hours_?! At once? Mental.”

They both laugh, then. The headache is still pounding but something else loosens up in the vicinity of his chest.

“John… Gosh, I don’t think you know how good it is to hear that. You’re really making an effort, and it shows. I want you to know that.”

This is starting to go right, and it makes John smile. Georgie is so nice, and she cares about him, and she’s so easy to snare in now that he’s gotten into her. She speaks again.

“Do you have anyone? Like, are you staying with someone, or…?”

“Actually, yes. An old friend took me in. She lives all the way in Cowley, too. I figured it would be nice to get a little distance between me and… You know, my old life.”

“Oh, good! Someone I know?”

“I don’t think so. Annabelle Cane?”

“Hm… Nope, doesn’t ring any bells. Is she nice? Oh, wait, are you two…?”

John takes a second to wonder if Georgie would be more or less invested in him if she thought he had a girlfriend, and decides that it would be less.

“Oh, oh no, no we’re not- No. I’m really not looking for anything at the moment. I, uh, "I don’t want to enter a relationship with anyone until I can be sure we are on equal footing, and it will be hard for me to be equal with anyone while I am still actively traumatized. I should be focusing on myself for a while.” Or whatever."

“Oh, wow. Yeah, that’s therapy speak, all right. Is that a direct quote?”

“… Yes.”

“Good. I mean, memorizing the advice is the first step to following it!”

Oh, he has her now. She is all open smiles and open hands. He could ask her to visit him right now, he realizes; she would come in a day or two or whenever she had time, and she would knock on that same door as Marco had, and when she entered she would be so full of hope and pride for him that there would be no time to think before eight hairy arms wrap around her torso.  
He could ask her, but he doesn’t.  
Georgie is only one person, and she believes him. She is going to go home and tell Melanie, and Melanie trusts Georgie, so Melanie would believe him. Maybe _he_ will visit _them_ first to reaffirm everything they believe, and his presence will become a welcome one and his face will be met with smiles and their little, human hearts will overflow with affection, and in that cornucopia of trust he could embed himself, wallow in it, he could-

“John?”

He blinks. The world is blurry. He realizes his glasses have slipped down his nose, and promptly corrects them.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, but the air of familiar comfort has chilled a little.  
“It’s been really good to see you, Georgie, but I should be getting back. I’m getting tired.”

“Oh.”

Is she disappointed? Or maybe this whole ordeal has been as overwhelming for her as it has been for him, and she’s kind of glad that it’s ending.

“Wait- Georgie, I hope this isn’t too forward, but… do you think I could have your number?”

She smiles.

“You already have my number.”

“You asked me to delete it, remember?”

She never asked him to delete her number. In fact, she had asked him to call her when he was ready to make an effort.

“Oh… Oh, right. I did. Yeah, sure, give me your phone.”

He does, and she saves herself in his contacts as “Georgie (pick up!!)”.

He leaves, then, but not before Georgie forces him into a selfie under the excuse of “needing evidence”.

* * *

“You could try sulking less, you know.”

Martin grits his teeth. He wonders briefly if avatars of the other entities get claws, like Helen has, because if so, he would very much like his pair right about now. Elias leans in the doorway like he owns the place. He kind of does. Martin curls his useless human-shaped fingers, but then he smiles, remembering the treat he has under the stack of paper mounting by the trashbin. He reaches in and pulls out an official HR complaint signed in the late nineties.

“Or,” he says, swirling around and patting the paper, “_you _could try not getting caught hotboxing in artefact storage on three separate occasions.”

If looks could kill, Martin would have been vaporized on the spot. As it stands, however, looks cannot kill, but they _can _fuel weeks of smugness, and they can also make days of useless and gruelling digging through ancient papers totally worth it.

“Or…” Elias says, eyes narrow but smiling wide, holding up his empty hand and pretending to tap an invisible paper, “_you _could try not stealing your aunt Sharon’s underwear when you were fourteen-“  
Martin yells to interrupt him. It doesn’t work.  
“-and wearing them to school, completely forgetting that you have gym class later that day-"  
Oh god, oh god,  
"-and then having to explain yourself to your classmates in the showers. “  
Martin hides his head in his hands. Do not get into a dirt-I-have-on-you fight with an omniscient asshole, got it.

“What do you want, Bouchard?”

“Well, I wanted to talk to you about Daisy, but we can keep doing this if you like. Do you want to know how Tommy from your first year ended up?”

“I don’t,” but he kinda does.

“He ended up marrying that girl he cheated on you with because she got pregnant. They named the boy Keith.”

“_Keith?!”_

“I know, awful name. He rips the wings off butterflies.”

Martin pushes against his eyelids until he sees stars.

“Is this just my life, now? Are you just going to be like this?”

“... No. I’m not. Apologies, Martin.”

Martin stops blinding himself for a second to watch Bouchard’s face, and he can’t find any leftover mockery there.

“… Fine. Just- let's just pretend it didn't happen." _please_ "So, Daisy?”

“Yes,” and Elias retrieves the folder under his armpit, finds the right page, and sets it down on Martin’s desk, text facing him.

“What… What exactly am I supposed to be looking at?”

“Did you know Daisy had employed herself?”

“Yeah, I- what? Wait, employed _herself_?”

“Yes. Did you think Peter did it?”

“I… Uh, yeah? I guess? I mean, I just kind of assumed she was going to start working here, since she was hanging around all the time anyway. I didn’t really… Wait.”

He traces a fingernail over the contract, brows furrowing. Behind him, Elias nods.

“Wait, she can do that?”

“Yes, it seems so. Her real name, an old address, her e-mail address, and…” under the heading_ in the position of ___,_ Daisy’s large handwriting has penned in the word “employed”. Martin stares at it.

“… Then, what’s her position? Officially?”

Elias shrugs.

“Employed, apparently.”

“What does that do? Like, in relation to the hierarchy?”

“That is what is so interesting. When she signed this contract, she did it for protection. I don’t think Ms Tonner had any intention of doing work. Now, since her contract does not specify any specific field, she could have gone anywhere in the institute, but she chose the archives because of Basira. Then, when she realized she was now under an obligation to actually _work _to stay healthy, she simply mimicked what those around her were doing, namely researching. If she had kept hunting like I had her do, she could have filled the Detective role. After my incarceration, she filled the archival assistant role. Now she has taken to simply reading and recording statements at Basira’s behest.”

“… Basira is making Daisy take statements?”

“That is what I said. She seems to believe that a stronger connection to the Watcher might lessen Daisy’s dependence on the Hunt. I am very curious to see if it will work.”

“And her role?”

“Right now, Daisy is acting as an Archivist.”

Martin muses that, if he had gotten these news a couple of weeks ago, he would have freaked out. Now, though, it seems almost fitting that things should just get as weird as they possibly can be.

“She’s _acting _like one, but she’s not the Archivist?”

“No. The Sense is one of the most rigid roles we have. Though, Daisy’s rash decisions have been a great source of learning for me; it seems that a contract only needs to bind a person to the temple to be effective, and their position under the Watcher is then decided by the way they choose to serve. That is why you could move from archival work to administration work without drawbacks, and it is why Daisy can now serve as a pleasing enough surrogate until we find John. And- please don’t disappear on me- _when_ we find John, there is a real possibility that the Web’s influence has made him unfit to retake his position. Should that be the case, I am seriously considering officially putting Daisy into his place. By then I suspect she will have taken to the statements with enough fervour to fit.”

Find John. Abduct John. Either kill John, or chain him back into the place that drove him to intellectual suicide. That is… No, that’s too big to think about. There’s no room in Martin’s head to fit all of the implications, so he does what he is best at and shoves it away into the ether. Just the brief idea of confronting it makes his physical form dissolve and he has to struggle to keep it together, so he just won’t think about it right now.

“I don’t care. Do what you want,” he mumbles, forcing it to be true.

“I think you do, but that’s fine. We can start by finding him. Speaking of, any luck?”

Martin tabs through the many open windows on his laptop, ending up on a small missing person’s notice published in a facebook group.

“Marco García. Went missing on his postal route, last seen eight hours ago. The police have told the family that it’s too early to do anything yet, but they swear he’d never go anywhere without telling them, so they’re reaching out to family and friends to find him. Won’t answer his phone. I did some digging-“ he tabs to Marco’s personal page, “-and found that Mr García often takes the packages where the address or names are too smudged to be read electronically and makes it kind of a personal mission to find the recipient. Sometimes he posts these packages to his facebook to see if anyone happens to know them, and…”

Martin scrolls down until he can find the picture, published yesterday. An unremarkable cardboard box with the name “Jonathan” written on it in permanent marker. The address, or the place where the address should be, is obscured by a wet stain. There is one comment from a deleted user saying _“Oh, I know that guy! DM me for details.” _And then the trail goes cold. Elias strokes his chin.

“Interesting. And what makes you think this has anything to do with _our _John?”

“… A hunch.”

Martin doesn’t have to turn around to feel how beamingly pleased Elias is. The hollow in his head has been aching a little ever since Peter disappeared, and now he grimly suspects that the return of Elias might also mark the return of the Watcher in full force, creeping its tendrils in through that hollow and settling back in. He had almost not followed this “hunch” out of pure principle, but… If they were going to find John, then a bit of supernatural nudging probably didn’t hurt.

“Great!” Elias says, sounding very sincere.  
“And do you have a similar _hunch_ about where on his postal route Mr García disappeared?”

“I don’t, actually.”

“That’s okay, I’m sure you’ll find out. Good work!”

Elias pats Martin on the shoulder, and for a second it feels like he’s been electrocuted. He’s out of his chair before he knows it, and out of this world before he can stop it. The Lonely blows through him and takes him away, leaving a frozen, frowning Bouchard in the empty office, hand still in the air where Martin had just been. He swears he can hear the wind whistling through the cracks around the window frame, and it sounds a lot like _don’t fucking touch me._

Martin is gone for the next three hours.

When he comes back he appears in Elias’ office without warning, causing his boss to spill a trivial amount of coffee on his tie. Elias sucks air through his teeth.

“There you are, just in time to ruin my-“ but he looks up, and sees Martin with a downright _feral _look in his eyes. He’s clutching his phone.

“Did you _know_.”

Martin is not breathing, and Elias gets the impression that he’s not really asking a question, either. He answers anyway.

“Know what, Martin?”

The phone is passed over the desk with a force that propels it off the edge like a hockey puck, and Elias just barely catches it in the air. It’s locked, but the day Elias Bouchard is stopped by something as simple as a four-digit code is the day it snows in hell.  
The screen shows Martin’s recent messages. The log is completely empty except a text from an unknown number, received five minutes ago, with the caption:

_hey, its Georgie (like Melanie-Georgie)_   
_Melanie gave me your number because she wanted me to send you this pic_   
_i met john today and idk if you know that he’s better but melanie says you should know, and that maybe whatever he did can work for you too?? not 100% on what you guys are dealing with over there but its a lot better over here. hes staying with a friend in cowley, so maybe talk to each other?_   
_call us if you need anything_

… And the photo in question attached. Elias takes a very, _very _deep breath.

The picture shows two people; one brown-faced, wide-smiling woman who Elias has never met in person, but whom he knows to be Georgina Barker. Next to her is none other than Jonathan Sims. Fresh-shaved, hair professionally cut, eyes clear and glittering. His cheeks still show potholes where the worms once burrowed but he honestly looks better than Elias has ever seen him; where the grey hairs used to look ratty and stress-induced, they now add a dignified charm. His eyes are no longer sinking into the back of his head. In fact, looking closer, the worm-scars aren’t even that noticeable now that there seems to be actual fat and muscle underneath them, and the furrows on his forehead have lessened into lines. John looks more like a twenty-something now than he did when he was actually twenty-something. It’s downright impressive.

“This is bad,” Elias mumbles.

“Oh, is it?” Martin answers, with a voice somehow both flat and brimming with emotion.  
“Is it bad? Is it, Elias? Because- and correct me if I’m wrong- _you _said that John was _dead._”

“Actually, I specifically said that he wasn’t dead.”

“Emotionally dead! Intellectually dead! _You _said-“

“Martin, please. I just said John was out there, it was Daisy who-“

“Yes! I know! And you agreed with her, and with Basira! _They _said that John- in- in the tape he left, that he had succeeded in it, and now his body was “taken by the Web” whatever that means, and you didn’t see _fit _to-“

Elias stands up, though Martin is taller than him by quite a lot, so the effect is somewhat lessened.

“Martin, calm down. Whatever else you think of me, I _didn’t know. _This is not a case of withholding information. I know it would be very convenient for you to just direct all your anger at me, _again_, but throwing a tantrum is not going to help us advance right now. I suggest you bottle up those feelings like Peter taught you to.”

Martin goes rigid. Elias continues.

“The reason this is bad is two-fold. One: John is going to be a lot harder to find if he is capable of movement. Two: his physical appearance makes it obvious that he is no longer fasting, and I do not believe Ms Barker would be inclined to take pictures with him if he was still taking live statements.”

Martin stares, but the hate in his eyes is diffused by confusion and, somewhere under the surface, a rising panic.

“So, he doesn’t need statements anymore? That’s a good thing?“

“Unless he is sustaining himself on something else. Unless he, like your co-workers told you, _has been in the possession of the Web _in an extremely _vulnerable and malleable state_. Think, Martin; what do spiders eat?”

Martin sits down, and watches Elias do the same. The old instinct to defend John rears its head for a second and he is about to tell Elias that John wouldn’t _do that_. Eat people? Liquify their insides? Or maybe the Web feeds on the things it represents, with the whole manipulation and controlling angle, but that still doesn’t sound like John. John is- was- socially awkward at best, and a complete asshole at his worst. Hell, they’re talking about the same guy who ends every casual text with “Regards, Jonathan Sims”, for god’s sake! How is he going to be enough of a social mastermind to play with people’s feelings?  
No, no, that doesn’t sound like the John Martin knows. Knew.

“Exactly,” Elias says. Martin bites back a comment about privacy in his own head.

“This is _not _the John that you knew, Martin. I have been frustratingly unable to See much about John ever since he left the Institute due to his thick protection by Annabelle Cane, who I assume to be this “friend in Cowley” that Ms Barker mentions, but I have had glimpses when she’s been distracted, and it has not been encouraging.”

“You’ve been Watching John?” Martin bristles again, happy to have found a target for his rapidly cooling rage.

“No- oh, lord help me, Martin. One of these days you are going to learn how to listen. Since you so valiantly refuse to do so today, I think I will have to _show_ you.”

Martin tries to look down but Elias’ greydawn eyes are on him, and, against his will and heavy protests, the knowledge implants itself in him; flashes of bright darkness, emptiness, the _scuttling of many-legged friends on his naked skin, a voice, the heavy warmth of a hand on his chest and the comforting knowledge that something more powerful than him has taken him in. He drifts from blank space to blank space and knows nothing, _is _nothing, but the nothing is a welcome break from the screaming nightmares that haunt him sleeping, where the eyes- the eyes-_

“That is all I’ve been getting for a long time. To be honest, I had stopped trying to Look.”

“H-had?”  
Martin’s teeth chatter against his will.

“Yes. In the light of John’s sudden re-emergence into society, I have tried again.”

“What? When?”

“Just now, when you showed me the picture. Trust me, Martin. The John in that picture is not the one you knew. But, as is our luck… He seems to still be the Archivist, no matter how alien he has become to the Beholding. We still need to find him.”

Martin sighs.

“Fine. I guess. I mean… Hill Top Road, then? That’s where all this Web stuff was happening before, and it’s in Cowley.”

“Yes, I think that-“

Elias’ face suddenly blanks out. Then he stands, forcefully enough to send his chair across the floor, and whirls his coat up with a flourish.

“Grab your jacket.”

“What?”

“I said- god _damn _it, Blackwood! _Listen! _I know where he is, grab your jacket!”


	5. Chapter 5

The November sun warms John’s face as he walks, passing by glittering cars and huddling strangers, both given to the early frost. He is at peace.

Roughly fifty-five miles away from him, Annabelle Cane knits the last of her stitches in place. She is also at peace.

The Archivist is not at peace.

It pops up in the windows and windshields where John should be, and every time it gets a little bit closer. John refusing to look at it does nothing; he still Knows the reflection is closing in, and he Knows it looks a little bit better each time. Just a little fresher. Despite the satisfied feeling that Georgie left behind John is starting to get uncomfortable, and he turns into an alleyway on a whim to escape the reflection. There are no windows, but also no way through. He turns back.

Everywhere there is a surface, there is the ghost. John takes to merging into crowds to make their reflections obscure his own, but when he looks to the left (a shopfront) he is staring right at himself, and when he turns to the right (car’s sideview mirror) he is staring there, too. He crosses the street and gets a glimpse of blown out pupils in the streetlight pole. He snakes his way through back alleys and side streets but there’s always a puddle or a sheet of ice, and when he realizes he’s lost, it’s too late. He is standing in a residential area with half the block under construction and he has no idea how to get back.

He takes a couple of deep breaths to collect himself. This is fine.  
It’s not actually fine, but it’s fine.

He has his phone on him, though the only number in it is Georgie’s and he doesn’t want to unravel his fragile new web by begging her to come find him. He could call emergency services, he supposes, though he’s not sure they would appreciate him wasting their time with asking for directions, and the thought makes him ashamed. No, no, it’s going to be fine, he just needs to… Think. Think, John.  
Where did he come from? The alleyway behind him leads to a fence, so obviously not from there. He starts walking in the middle of the curiously deserted road to be as far away from any windows as he can be. He would ask for directions, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone else here. Just him and the reflection. He chances a look at a distant car and sees the lidded face of it pressed against the window, as close as it can get, and he promptly turns around.

The wind blows frozen leaves across the street. At the end of the street is a man.

Something tilts in John’s stomach.

The man feels like Georgie felt, in that John _knows him_ without knowing him, but there is something more. There is so much more. He’s not much taller than John is, he’s wearing the same kind of coat, his hair is combed back and his face is too far away to be read, but his eyes, they- it’s like they are coming closer without the man moving, all monotone grey like a power washed slate, and they-  
And they-  
And _he-_

John is _Seen. _

He’s turning and running before he has time to think, brain rattling in his skull from the sudden, sobering rush of being known. He can’t rightly explain the fear that drives his legs but he sees the reflection follow in the corner of his eyes now and it is running with him, and it is _staring_. His heart pounds in his chest and he turns a corner to get away from the greyslate eyes, and it’s like running right into a brick wall. The man is around the corner. He is staring too.

John turns and flees the other way, and all the while he can feel the burrowing sensation of eyes on him. The construction site fence stops down the block and he hurls himself into it, quick as a rabbit, coat arm ripping open on exposed machinery when he takes a sharp left, then a right, ignoring several mandatory hardhat signs in his chase away from the stranger. Even later, John will not be able to explain the instinct that drove him into the half-finished apartment complex.

He is simply an animal, desperately trying to escape the horror of knowing and being known. It is a human thing.

This time, turning a corner _literally _feels like hitting a brick wall. He bounces back against the blockade and is on his feet again the next heartbeat, but when he tries to run past it, it reaches out and grabs him. The idea that walls generally don’t have arms doesn’t even enter his mind; he just swirls to escape and bolts the other way, and is, pathetically, grabbed again. When the wall speaks it barely reaches him through the bloodrush in his ears, but it does. Oh, it does.

“John, please. “

It is like Georgie. It is also nothing like Georgie.  
It is like Martin.

He stops, because the pain in his head would topple him if he tried to move.  
He stops, because the physical parts of him are being held in place.  
He stops. Completely, he stops. Everything that Martin is, everything that Martin has been, and everything that Martin’s existence in the world implies and confirms is too much for him, so he stops, and he does not stare, even if he is being stared at. The Lonely crackles around them. In the shadows behind the wall there is a figure emerging, and it is almost, but not entirely, all eyes.

“Let me go,” John whispers, eyes on the figure. His heart is too big for his chest. His lungs fill into the part of his ribcage that is missing something.

“I can’t, John.”

“You can. You- you could-“

It’s coming closer, now, uncontained by any surface. It walks on feet that don’t completely touch the ground.

“No, John, I _can’t. _You need to come back.”

Oh, it looms. Oh, he is so afraid. Martin’s hand is cold on his arm and he does not yield, nor does he seem to notice the thing behind him, made of sclera and blinking nothing.

John looks up at his captor for the first time, and allows the headache to split with recognition.  
Martin is a large man with large, sad eyes and large, firm hands, made for holding people in place. The memories of him feel _raw _in his head but it’s not like he can stop them; they are made of shuffling feet and underlined breaths and the smell of tea, the gentle and ignored thank yous, _Martin is made of loyalty and forgetfulness and he was always so easy to manipulate, but not right now, and not by him. Not on purpose. Martin was there when the worms came and his preparations were the only reason any of them survived, but the Archivist did not thank him for that. Just like the Archivist barely ever thanked him for the tea or the work he brought, or his honesty in the face of cruel unknowns, or his willingness to lay down his life for the safety of others, often strangers. The Archivist read Martin’s poetry and discarded it because it was irrelevant, just like the Archivist so easily discarded Martin himself if he wasn’t immediately useful, despite the tender eyes that seemed to be the only things in the world that were content with just seeing him, not needing to Know him. Was it a surprise that Martin started to drift? Was it really unexpected that Martin Blackwood, forever ignored and dismissed, would feel the Lonely calling to him from a crowd? The Archivist had not cared enough until it was too late, and by then Martin had started to Know him, better than he knew himself.  
“Who are you kidding, John? You’re not going to do any of that. You don’t want to blind yourself; you don’t want to die; what you want is a reason not to do those things, so you come to me.”_

When the years’ worth of memories subsides, John is leaning against the wall that is Martin. The lack of heat from his body feels nice against John’s feverish forehead.

“But I did it,” he croaks. He desperately wants a cigarette.

“… You didn’t. Not really.”

“But I _did. _I got out, Martin, I- I’m free. I did do it. I _did._”

Martin is no longer holding him in place. They both know he can’t run.

“You’re not free, John. You can’t be. Don’t make this difficult, we need to get you back home.”

“No.”

“Yes. Come on.”

“No,” John insists, but he’s just not physically strong enough to prevent Martin from moving him, and the Archivist watches them both with great interest. It is hovering so close that John can see his reflections in its many eyes. His real reflections.

“It’s not me!” he tries to explain, desperately trying to point the ghost out to Martin, but he doesn’t react and doesn’t seem to see it when it slowly lifts a blind hand to them.

“It’s not me, it’s not-“

“John, _please._” And Martin is shaking, wide eyes brimming.

“Martin, please!”

He wrenches himself around which forces Martin to hold his arm at a rather twisted angle, but as he does, he can now see the horrifying, normal-looking, monotone-eyed man that chased him here, standing patiently at the mouth of the unfinished building. He smiles with perfectly straight teeth.

John is Seen with the worst kind of clarity. In one moment, his brain is razed to the ground by blinding light. In the next moment, he is gone.

* * *

“The handcuffs are really not necessary.”

“I’m keeping them on him.”

“I understand that, but they are really not necessary. You’re handling this rather poorly.”

“I swear to god, Bouchard, I’m gonna-” _strangle you where you sit_

“You’re not.”

“I could.”

“But you won’t.”

He won’t, and the fact annoys Martin greatly.

He put the handcuffs on John’s unconscious body more for his own sake than anything else. He’s pretty sure John wouldn’t be able to run if he wanted to. No, the cuffs are mainly there so Martin has something other than John’s body to hold on to, because, if he’s being perfectly honest, he’s _this close _to breaking down. Not having to touch John is a tiny comfort, and you know what? Martin has deserved some semblance of comfort.

Pushing him into the Lonely had been taxing. Martin has only ever been there a couple of times himself and he has never had any intention of abducting people like Peter does, so when Elias told him they needed to separate John from the world, it had been…  
Martin swallows. He looks out the window of the car.  
It had been _good. _Exhausting, but good. The moment when John started walking in the middle of the road, like he knew there were never going to be cars there again? _Oh, _that had been good. Martin hates himself for it.  
He hates himself even more for the blazing panic in John’s eyes when Martin cornered him, and the desperation in his voice. _I did it. I did! _Pleading like a child facing mortal consequences from disapproving parents, and Martin _hates himself. _

At least Elias had been the one to knock John unconscious, so Martin could delegate some of his hatred to that. Though, as Elias has pointed out, John wouldn’t have needed to be unconscious if Martin had a better grip on himself. He hates that it’s true.

_I’m free! I did do it. I did._

He’s kind of thankful that Elias doesn’t have a driver’s license, because focusing on the road at least provides some kind of distraction from the-

“It’s your fault I lost it.”

Martin clenches his fist around the steering wheel until the knuckles turn white.

“Stop looking in my head.”

“Of course, of course, but my point stands. My arrest was the only reason I lost my license. So, really, this is your fault.”

“… Why did a murder charge cost you your license?”

“Because it was false.”

Martin’s mouth droops a little, now staring at the road with more concern and confusion than whatever he was feeling before.

“You- You had a fake license?”

“Yes. Had. I couldn’t pass the test when I was younger, and once I came into my powers it was much easier to falsify it than try again.”

Martin cannot for the life of him figure out why Elias is telling him this, but it sure as hell is a welcome distraction. It’s kind of hard to be self-flagellating when you’re busy being baffled. Elias leans back and smiles to himself, satisfied, and they ride the rest of the way in silence.

When they approach the parking reserved for employees of the Magnus Institute, Martin’s dread seeps back into him. He desperately tries not to think as he stops and kills the ignition, or as he opens the back door, or as he unfastens John from his seatbelt, and he very explicitly tries not to think about anything when he tugs on John’s handcuffs to get him moving. Obviously, he doesn’t budge. Martin has to touch him to get him out.  
His hand hovers over John’s shoulder for a second, then two.

“Would it be easier if I woke him up?” Elias asks, sounding almost cheerful. Is it the Beholding that makes him into such a sadist, or was he always an asshole? But Martin nods stiffly and retreats his hand, and Elias steps into his place, reaching out to thumb one of John’s eyelids open. The eyeball underneath twitches wildly before suddenly stopping. John takes in a ragged gasp.

Oh no. Oh god. Martin grits his teeth and looks away, feeling tears rise in his throat. _Not now. _

John’s bleary eyes spin around the interior of the car, and the stifled noise he makes when Elias reaches in and hoists him out is enough to break a heart. When he’s finally on his own two feet in the parking lot he seems to realize where he is, and the dawning horror on his face is just too much. Martin turns away.

“No,” John whispers, shaking his head back and forth, back and forth. Elias tugs at his handcuffs but John digs his heels in.  
“_No._”  
It’s just too much.

Martin spins and pushes Elias away with more force than necessary, grabbing John by the jacket and _forcing _him forward, spending the last of his willpower ignoring the hurt noise he makes. He’s always been a big guy and he’s never in his life made a point of it, but oh, now he does; he drags the struggling archivist over the cement like he’s a ragdoll, deaf to the protests, deaf to everything except a burning desire to get this thing over with before he completely dissolves, even deaf to the sobs working their ways up his own throat as Elias trots behind, looking all kinds of pleased-  
But he can’t make himself deaf to the sound John makes when they approach the door. He _can’t_.

“Martin,” John gasps, “Martin, please don’t do this, _please,_”

“Shut up, John.”

“Don’t make me, don’t make me-“

He sounds so scared. Martin has had many, many different fantasies including John, and some of those have been imaginary conversations where John admits all his faults and begs for forgiveness, but he has never… He has never imagined what John would sound like _scared_, and especially not scared of _him_. It’s just not right. It doesn’t compute. In the moment of shocked silence, Elias bolts to the doors and unlocks them, and Martin has just enough will left to hurl himself and John into the lobby.

Then, finally, he breaks.

“Fuck you,” he spits at Elias, angry tears now rolling freely down his face. For once, Elias looks surprised. He opens his mouth to answer but Martin doesn’t let him. He yells, and he walks backwards, getting as far away from both of them as he can.  
“Fuck you, fuck this, fuck this whole-ass plan, I’m not doing it anymore! I’m done!”  
“M-“  
“No, don’t _Martin _me, I’m done! I did what you asked, but I’m not going to be here for your- fucking- whatever it is you’re planning to do with him. Look at him! He’s _pathetic_! You did this, to both of us, and I’m _done._”

There has never been a relief like letting the Lonely take him, then. It is so exceedingly comfortable to just let relationships belong to another world, and slip into one where there is no one else to interact with, no one to expect things from you. There are no _responsibilities _in the Lonely_. _No e-mails to answer or forms to fill out or HR complaints to evaluate, no smug Bouchard to drop secrets of the universe on him, no tiny, shivering, parody of Jonathan Sims to upset him, no nothing, no anyone, just…  
Just him, and his peace, and all the time he needs.

Martin is going to wander that emptiness for a long time. Maybe he’ll stay, this time.

He does not expect to find Peter Lukas.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i don't know if peter lukas would actually say "toodles" but uuuh my ship now

_He has been abandoned._

Elias is not as big or strong as Martin, but his veins pump Watching, and John cannot resist being Seen.

_He has been completely abandoned._

Elias leads him through the empty Institute by the arm. John has stopped pretending like he can’t recognize the place, and the dread of their destination makes his knees stiff, which in turn makes Elias tug him harder.  
Not as strong as Martin, but strong enough to hurt. Just a little.

John sobs at the top of the stairs and is surprised to feel a warm hand on his shoulder. Elias squeezes, almost comforting in the controlling, almost. It strikes him that he has been taught to walk twice already, and now he gets a third time, as Elias has to physically push his body down each torturous step to the archives, where the stone walls are slick with forgotten memories and he can feel his own ragged breath fog them up, almost calling, almost entering, but always staying at the edges of his watched mind- that is where Melanie screamed, this is where Tim saw Prentiss for the first time, and here, on the floor among the bookshelves and papers-  
The tears cloud his vision but he can still feel the colours falling into place, making this room. This scene. His legs tremble with remembered weakness.

_He has been abandoned, and he is eating himself._

“Sit down,” Elias orders, and John falls into the chair. The last time he was here he put his feet up, and they stayed that way. He does not do this now. He does not want to die again.  
Elias rolls his neck, loudly. John watches his blurry figure go to the filing cabinet by the door and push it from the wall, and then he reaches _into _the wall, fingers curling around something in the blackness.  
He pulls out a pipe.

“You know, John, I expected Annabelle to betray me.”

He shifts his grip on the heavy metal. John stares.

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t. I worked very hard on you, and she ruined you, and now you _don’t understand_. No matter. A minor setback, in the grand scheme of things. At least she… Oh, what did she say? _Dance the steps that she has been assigned__?_” and he turns, smiling, pipe glinting in the dim lamplight. John still stares as he approaches.

“The Spider is not the only one who can plan a couple of steps ahead. I thought- foolishly, maybe- that there was still something left in you, but you were thorough. Let that be a comfort, John. You _were _free. And whatever part of you that is still the Archivist… Well, I’m sure it can die. Most things can.”

John does not see Elias swing at him. John is staring, and the thing behind Elias stares back, all eyes.

* * *

_Click. Whirr._

The sounds of bones breaking beneath flesh. Grunts, full of effort. No one is screaming. No one is crying anymore. The cracks continue, muted, padded. Something clatters to the floor.

_Click._

“What are you doing?!”

“Oh my god- John!”

The sounds of a struggle.

_Click._

_In the dream, he can see Daisy break down the door. It strikes him that she should probably be somewhere else, given that it’s Sunday and all, but the ghost beside him shakes its head sadly. It Knows that Daisy has been sleeping in the archives for months, so now they both Know it. They are both surprised by the strength and willingness with which she bashes Elias Bouchard's head into the floor. Now they both know that, as well._

_Click._

“I’m gonna kill you!”

“You’re n-“

More sounds of breaking, this time loud and visceral. _Click._

_John is made to understand that the ghost can’t die, but he very much can, and they should work on preventing that. Why did Elias choose to kill him here, anyway? And John understands that it is due to the strings flowing from him, tugged like violin strings by a player going off script, so now they both know it.  
That’s the thing about being manipulated. You’re not supposed to know it’s happening._

_Click. Click. Click, whirr._

* * *

Martin wanders the streets of his dream London, blessing every breath of unpolluted air he takes. The suggestion of a wind rustles in the trees, though they are not the brilliant yellow and orange colours that he left behind; these trees are dead, and their branches stand bare.  
it is not hot, and it is not cold. Martin is perfectly comfortable in his jacket. He even smiles a little as he meanders his way to the closest coffee shop, having some vague idea of strolling along the embankment with a cup of coffee and a pastry like all the tourist photos do.

Obviously, he is surprised to see Peter Lukas in there. Surprised, but not unsettled.

Peter has pushed several tables together and is laying across them, using his sweater as a pillow under his chin. He is reading a book with a blank, green cover. When the little bell above the door jingles he looks up and, like Martin, he seems just a little bit perturbed. 

They don’t greet each other. The Lonely is not a place for that.

Martin goes behind the counter. He has no idea how to work the polished beast of an espresso machine. so he just fills the electric kettle with water and puts it on. Flipping the switch does nothing. He frowns.

“No electricity,” Peter says. Martin expected another voice to feel intrusive in this place, but Peter just, kind of… Fits. His voice is no more noticeable than the rustling of the leaves and the useless _click, click _of the kettle, refusing to turn on.

“Ah,” Martin says. He pours the cold water into a cardboard cup and puts a tea bag in it, figuring it will just have to do. Then he tops it with a plastic lid.

The two of them share a long, long look. This is really _weird_ but, after the day Martin has had, it feels like that “this might as well be happening” kind of weird, and he can’t say he minds all that much. At least Peter is going to fuck right off if Martin asks him to. That’s a comfort. He’s about to say something about it, but instead picks up a paper tube of sugar from the countertop, rips the top off, and dumps the whole thing in his mouth.  
Peter chuckles and goes back to his book.

That’s it, then. The conversation is decidedly over. Martin is going to take his cold-brewed tea and go out into the empty world, and he’s going to stay there for as long as he wants and eat as many pure sugar packets as he feels like. Maybe he’ll stay for a day or two. Maybe he’ll stay forever. Or, maybe, he is going to stay for just over three months, like Peter has.  
Hm. Right.

“Hey…” Martin begins, cringing a little at the sound of his own voice. Peter looks up.

“Hm?”

“Are you, uh… Ever coming back, or?”

“Oh, yes. I suppose I am. How long has it been?”

“Three months, give or take. Mostly give.”

“Oh my, has it been that long? That means I missed the leaves changing colours. How upsetting.” But he does not look upset.

“Yeah, you did. I mean, some of the trees still have leaves on them, but… You know. It snowed last week.”

“Did it, now?”

“Yeah.”

They look at each other. Martin smacks his sugar-crusted lips against the silence.

“… So…”

“So?”

“So, why did you leave?”

“For the same reasons you did, I expect.”

“Yeah, but I’ve been here a couple of minutes. Three months is a long time to sulk.”

Peter languidly gets up from his pretend bed, stretching like a cat on his way. Martin shudders when his spine pops.

“I did not come here to _sulk, _Martin.”

“No? It’s okay if you did. I did.” When did he become so forgiving? He had been blazingly angry at Peter Lukas not too long ago, but... Well, Martin supposes he can relate more to him, now. It is very nice to just disappear and let your problems do whatever they feel like. Peter frowns.

“I do not _sulk. _I simply had a confrontation that made me very nervous, so I came here to calm down.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not particularly, no. You know, I would prefer it if you stopped asking me questions. That is exactly what I come here to avoid.”

More comfortable silence. Martin gives his tea a tentative sip and finds that it tastes exactly like nothing. He wonders if it might be the influence of the Beholding that keeps him asking questions, but deep down he knows that the Eye can’t see him here. This place is spoken for.

“… And, what about the mission?”

“Yes, the mission. The extinction. I suppose my contacts have had enough time to prepare by now. This vacation has been nice, but it’s time to get back to work, eh? You can stay if you like. Take in the scenery.”

Peter winks at him and gets up on his feet, but Martin is staring at his cup, swirling the contents with a frown.

“I don’t think you can get back to work, Peter.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“… Because you kind of got fired?”

Peter’s face reveals absolutely nothing. Martin feels absolutely nothing. His tea tastes like nothing.

“… Huh. So you say.”

“Yeeeah, you, uh… I mean, you stopped showing up.”

“I did do that, didn’t I?”

“You really did, so. Fired. Oh, Elias is back.”

“Oh! Good, I expect he has everything under control, then.”  
Peter smiles with extreme relief, and Martin feels just a tug of that old anger. _How happy you are to not do your job. How easy it is for you to leave it to me._

“Yeah, I guess he does. He’s a twat, though.”

“Now, now, watch the language! I’m sure Bouchard is just doing whatever he can to further his own goals, just like everyone else on the planet. To be honest, he is welcome to the position. Far too much interaction for my tastes. Speaking of; I have become very inclined to leave you all of a sudden, but don’t fret! I will contact you at the office.”

He balls up his sweater and shoves the book under his armpit.

“Toodles!”

And then he is gone.


	7. Chapter 7

Alice “Daisy” Tonner has, all things considered, been having a pretty good time lately. The whole fuckup with John slowly killing himself at his desk while everyone just let it happen was kind of a bust, yes, and having to Weekend at Bernie’s him out of the institute and into the arms of a waiting spider-god was not much better, but…  
Still, break a few eggs and all that. Or, no, that’s not the saying.

“Hey, Basira?”

Basira whispers something warm into Daisy’s shoulder. She can’t hear what it is.

“What’s that thing people say when they’re trying to cheer you up? Something like “it gets better” but not that.”

Basira whispers again. Her arms slip over the off-white singlet Daisy is wearing, and then under it, resting quietly against the skin of her ribcage. She’s probably asleep.

They can’t agree on exactly when they became officially a _thing_. Daisy says it was the first night they slept together, because that must be a milestone, but Basira claims it wasn’t official-official until they pushed their cots together, which would put their relationship somewhere in the month mark. They’re not a normal couple, anyway, so it fits that they wouldn’t have one anniversary date.  
They’ve agreed on celebrating the first time they slept together, the first time they pushed their cots together, the first time they kissed heatedly over the shift stick at a stakeout (though they can’t remember when that was, it happened a lot) _and _the first time they exchanged “I love you so you better survive this-s” in face of potential death.  
Having many anniversaries has its perks. Keeps them grounded.

Daisy remembers the saying.

“It’s always darkest before dawn,” she tells Basira. Basira doesn’t answer.

It is quite rare that Daisy is awake before her partner these days. Stifling the Hunt is a tiring process, so Daisy finds herself sleeping most of the day away, and when she’s awake Basira is usually there to make her keep active. This week’s project is reading statements; Basira has a theory that if they could feed John then they might feed Daisy, and after the first argument got way out of hand, they have agreed to collectively ignore where that feeding got John in the end.  
Daisy hates the idea that the only way to survive anymore is to switch your sadist addiction from one power to the other. She _hates _the idea that if she can’t worship the Hunt then she has to worship the Eye. She kind of hates how well its been working, how happy Basira is to see a flush-faced, post-statement Daisy reaching for a glass of water like normal people do after a meal, but she can’t hate the results. She has something to stay alive for now.

Daisy untangles herself from the woman she loves and sits up on the cot. The archive’s backroom is cold this time of year, and she has to hurry to put her pants on over goosebumped skin. She pulls her cargo jacket over the singlet, zips it, and stands up to stretch some feeling back into her arms.

Today might be just another kinda-good day. She hopes so.

Daisy is looking for her phone and Basira is dressing when they both hear the bang. They have time to look at each other, just for a second, before there is another one; this one close to the wall. Basira’s mind goes to worms inside the wall and Daisy’s to more human intruders, but then there is another, and another, and a wet sort of crunching noise like stepping on a ripe melon, and Daisy is bolting to the archives unarmed. Basira flings the covers of their cots on the floor, looking for the guns.

Sixty seconds later she’s in the room and her boots slip on the blood-slick floor.

* * *

_The ghost that John now knows as the Archivist knows many, many things. It knows these things because it watches, and it watches because it has to. John does not have to. John can act._

_Everything feels sluggish in this in-between, but John manages to move, and the Archivist moves with him. It watches him hover over his own body. Elias caved his head in, he notices absently. All that is left of it is blood-matted hair and a bit of brain. The Archivist lets him know that the body they have both inhabited was once able to heal itself and, maybe, with enough help from the powers above, it could do so again. It would be preferable to both of them if the body did not stay dead forever. They have worked very hard on it._

_The Archivist switches its attention to Elias Bouchard, who has drifted out of consciousness after Daisy cracked him like an egg against the side of the desk. He will live because the Beholding likes him. The Beholding used to like the Archivist, too, before it ate itself all up, and that memory makes them both sad. The Web likes John, but let no one say that the mother of puppets plays favourites; she might help them if it suits her, and John thinks it just might suit her if they survive. Revive. _

_The End has nothing to say in the matter. It is too old to be impatient. _

_So John reaches out, and the Archivist reaches back. They stand on the precipice of brutality, and together, they push._

* * *

“You motherfucking-“

Crack.

“You absolutely-“

Crack. Snap.

“You- _you-“_

Bang. Crack. _Click. _

Bouchard looks dead already but it’s only Basira’s hands that is keeping him from turning into pulp as she hangs onto Daisy, keeping her arms back, desperately trying to pull her away; Daisy fights back and lashes out with her legs instead, kicking Elias in the ribs and stomach until things start breaking. She’s been yelling over the noise to calm her girlfriend down, so really, it’s a wonder that she even hears the tape recorder click on, but she does. Maybe it’s because it’s so close to her, on the desk.  
That doesn’t explain why she hears the second one; the third one; the fourth and the fifth, all turning on in rapid succession, drowning out Daisy’s faltering swears under a sea of _click, click, click, click- _  
All around the office the tape recorders start whirring. The sound comes from inside cabinets and under papers, in drawers and closest and pockets, appearing out of nowhere and then turning on, like a choir of blind watchers coming in to witness… Whatever it is they are witnessing. Basira scans the room, but all she sees are black rectangles nesting in places they weren’t before.

“What…” Daisy whispers, standing still now, listening now, as Elias Bouchard bleed on the floor.

“What…” Basira echoes, letting her arms fall from a chokehold to a hug.

Elias says nothing on account of the collapsed lung.

No one is watching John’s corpse. No one notices the shining webs stretching sticky strands over his skull to pull the pieces together, or the glimmering strands that drag his now-whole eye back into its socket, or the gentle, struggling, smoke-scarred heave of his lungs as he takes a ragged breath.  
No one notices, except the recorders.

* * *

_They go in together. There is space for them both in John’s body. In the places where their presence makes it bulge, the Web laces around to make it fit. It hurts. That means it works._

John was born once, as most humans are.  
Then he was a born a second time, as many avatars are.  
He is the only person to be born a third time.

And he is. He comes back into this world in shocked, cold pain, and when the spiders inside him knit his lungs into shape, he uses them to _scream_. He continues screaming to the joy of the recorders around him and flops onto his back, wallowing in his own blood, eyes new and bright and staring into the everything around him, and he screams until there is someone by his side to shut him up.  
It’s Basira, whose interest in him is more practical than friendly but who still has enough human in her to respond to pack instinct.  
“John!” she says, and that’s _him, _whose newfound duality of life is wreaking havoc on his insides.  
Daisy appears behind her. Daisy, whose round-marble eyes can’t express both happiness and grief and so have settled into shock.  
And he screams.  
He sees their pasts and presents and he sees their strings still, and he screams.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i cant believe we're at the end here  
next chapter is mostly a tiny self-indulged prologue, the main storyline ends here (if there has been a storyline idk, this is my first Big Fic)
> 
> thank you if youve read this far, if you ever need a place to stay around northern norway then just hmu babey i got a couch for you as thanks

Daisy is very, very tired.

It’s insane to think that she woke up next to Basira just an hour ago, thinking that today was just going to be another day spent in comfortable nothing. Now she’s crumpled in the breakroom couch and trying to get brainchunks out of her boot soles with a piece of dental floss.  
This is her life now.

The office was covered in blood by the end and they were really not in the mood to clean it up, so they just moved. Besides, the office didn’t have enough chairs. Basira is sitting next to Daisy on the couch and staring at nothing and, beside her again, in a different couch next to the door, is John, laying on his back. They brought Elias, though he is still unconscious. He gets the floor.

Daisy is doing her best not to look at John. It’s not just because he was a headless pulp of a man when she first saw him, only to turn into an unharmed and screaming man in front of her eyes. That doesn’t help, but that’s not why.  
No, Daisy is staring intently at her boots because she’s afraid that if she looks at John then he might look back.

Where there used to be two, separate, dull-brown irises, John now has four. Two in each eye. They intersect like a Venn diagram in the middle, creating a sort of figure eight-shaped pupil, and she does not like to be seen by them.

The air feels like they’re all just waiting for something to happen, but honestly, Daisy would greatly prefer just going back to sleep. Let Elias die of internal bleeding if he’s going to. Let John collect himself and either leave or stay. “Let’s just go back,” she mumbles, hoping Basira can hear her, wherever she is.  
Basira does hear, but she shakes her head.

“I’d love to just drop this, but we can’t.”

“Why?”

“I have to know.”

Basira shuts her eyes to avoid making eye contact with her girlfriend, but it doesn’t help. They both know how that sounds.

“… Feed that which feeds you, eh?”

“Not now, Daisy. I just… I just have to know what’s going on.”

Being curious and being unwilling to ask questions is an unfortunate combination, and it leaves them sitting in silence. John is awake, so they could ask him. They could. A lot has probably happened to him since he was taken in the house at Hill Top Road. There’s probably a good reason why Elias was beating his head in with a pipe. Come to think of it, hasn’t that happened before?

But neither of them ask and so neither of them get their answers.

Until Elias stirs.

The tape recorders followed them into the breakroom, because of course they did, and their soft whirs pick up speed right before Elias groans from the floor. Like they were expecting it. He shifts and shambles and kind of rolls into Daisy’s view over the coffee table, where he stays still on his back and breathes. The pain on his face makes something move in her chest. Something wanton. She tries not to think about it.  
His first couple of words are wheezing and pathetic, but they assemble themselves.

“You.” He says. He’s not looking at any of them, but John reacts like it’s directed at him, and Daisy is glad for it. She works a dried-up chunk of brain out of her shoes and watches him sit up. His eyes, all four of them, point at Elias.

“Yes?”

His voice is very normal, if a bit hoarse. Probably from the yelling.

“How…”

Elias manages to get into a sort of sitting position before John gets up to assist him. It’s kind of satisfying, in a weird way; seeing Elias needing help for once, and seeing John being so willing to offer it. It would be downright sweet if Daisy trusted either of them. John helps Elias to the couch and sits him down all dignified-like, and, judging by the pain and hate on Elias’ face, it’s not very welcome, but it happens.  
Elias’ right eye is completely covered by dark swelling, and the rest of his face is ablaze with creeping colour; purple here, greenish yellow here, straight-up scarlet around his mouth (which is re-growing teeth), and his hair has tangled into a single, bloody, crusted-over mass on his head where Daisy knocked him into the desk. The injuries should probably have been lethal, but Bouchard is healing right in front of them. They should enjoy the sight while it lasts.

Daisy takes Basira’s hand and squeezes. They don’t need to look at each other to know they’re sharing a smile.

John sits down on the coffee table and reaches into his blood-soaked coat pocket, pulling out a sleek, metal cigarette case. None of them protest when he lights one.  
That damn lighter. Daisy can’t help it; she laughs, and then covers her mouth, and then laughs again through the fingers. _It’s bizarre. _This is all just bizarre.  
She’s so tired.

“A statement would help you heal,” John informs the room, vaguely directed at Elias. His eyes narrow.

“And you would give me one?”

John nods. Takes a drag.

“I would. I think the time is right, now. It won’t be again. Ask.”

His voice is normal through the smoke. Calm. Elias rubs his wounded throat.

“What are you?”

John smiles, and his multitude of eyes smile with him.

“You were right, that tingles a little. It’s kind of nice. As to what I am, I’m not sure. I think I’m the first of me. I know I am two things, one of which is the Archivist. The other, well, he is…” he waves a long-fingered hand and sends a snowfall of ashes onto the floor, “he is John, as our collective selves are John.”

“How did you become John?”

“Oh, not so fast. That’s not how this goes. You’re supposed to take my statement.”

The tape recorders whirr in agreement and Elias sighs, leaning sideways into the closest one.

“Statement of the _being_ known as Jonathan Sims, regarding… His existence. Statement taken directly from subject, the twenty-fifth of November, two thousand and eighteen. Statement begins.”

“That is much better. You’ve been doing this for a while, haven’t you? Know the right questions to ask, the right knowledge to implant, the right memories to bring forth so people don’t bother you… I can do that too, you know. I couldn’t do it when I was just the Archivist and I couldn’t do it when I was just John, but now? Now I think I could. I think I can do most anything, now.”

“I can see the webs. Literally see them. I don’t think even Annabelle can do that. This particular one is long; it goes back to before any of us were born, when the Mother was in its infancy and under great threat by other entities and their foolhardy avatars. The Mother of Puppets cannot act by itself, it goes against its nature, but it could pull strings even then, and it used them well. There is a reason, Elias, that no ritual has ever succeeded. Why the world so stubbornly stays this way. This is how the Web wants it; it cannot exist in any other form, so it has worked very, _very _hard to keep things like this.”

“Servants of the Beholding have always been preferable. Others can do in a pinch, yes, but only we have the long-sightedness required to see our plans through. Traditionally we haven’t minded it much; a little help from the Mother to further our own goals, hindering everyone else in return. It’s a good relationship, even if the servants often don’t know it’s there. That’s the thing about manipulation, isn’t it? You’re not supposed to know it’s happening.” He chuckles.

“_You _certainly didn’t know it was happening when you approached Annabelle Cane with an offer of me. _You_ had been grooming me into just the right pedestal to hold the Watcher’s Crown, but I upset you by starting to disobey orders. Starving myself. You wanted to get out of prison to correct it, but the Institute had grown hostile towards you, and so, you came to her. She promised you great things, didn’t she? A Magnus Institute even better than the old one, where the employees never disobeyed you and you could never be dethroned again. All you needed to do was let her take me. At the time you thought it was because she wanted to delay your little ritual and you were fully intending to steal me back when the time came, so you agreed. And you waited. And you waited.”

“When you realized what I had done to myself you were _furious_. Pacing up and down in that cosy cell of yours, wringing your hands… You hated yourself for not realizing, but, alas, that is the weakness of the Watcher. Always concerned with the past and the present. How could you know what I was going to do? You couldn’t even see me while it was happening, even if it took so, so long, and you just kept telling yourself that you would figure it out once you were back in your rightful place. While Jonathan Sims was consuming his own insides, you were trapped like an animal.”

“And then Martin came and offered it to you. That’s when you realized that the deal was still on, and this was Annabelle fulfilling her end of it. But I am getting ahead of myself.”

“When I… Died, I did so by hollowing myself out. I did not realize that I no longer owned all of myself. The parts of me that belonged to the Beholding were purged from me when there was nothing left to hold on to, and it simply had to watch as the body it once inhabited switched hands; it was carried out of the Institute and into the cold, damp, darkness that is the Web, and there it began to _fester. _Its little human zoo of trauma was empty except for the echoes of Jonathan Sims. As Annabelle taught the body how to walk and talk and think in intricacies, these new experiences started giving the Archivist a foothold. When John woke up in that cellar, the Archivist was haunting him. This feedback loop of trauma should have starved them both out, but… Well, even I don’t know why it worked. I know it did. The Archivist fed on John and John fed on the Web, and both grew fat and strong.”

“Annabelle knew. She fed John statements to keep the parts of him that Watched happy. She fed him people to maintain the rest. He grew up remarkably quickly and, when he was ready to die again, she sent him out into the world.”

“That is where you come back in. Re-appointed as head of the Institute, with an assistant that hated your guts and an archival staff that would kill you on sight. The Beholding was breathing down your neck and you _knew _you had to fix this, get me back somehow- either to kill or reinstate me, as long as something _happened. _You had tried to Look into my whereabouts for days without luck. Tell me, Elias, when did your eyes open to me again? When could you finally See me?”

The dips and lulls of a good statement is broken by this, and Daisy feels like she’s fallen out of a trance. Her bewildered eyes find Basira, and then Elias, who looks… Startled. Startled and a little afraid.  
_Good. _

“Right after Martin was sent that picture of you. He suggested we look for you on Hill Top Road, and then I Saw.”

“And did that not strike you as strange?”

“… It didn’t, at the time. You don’t need to _show off_, John.”

“I don’t need to, but I want to. You had a picture of me, alive and well, delivered straight in your lap- oh, but not before Martin saw it. It was necessary that he know how well I was doing, and he needed to see Georgie, who _had told him she was giving up on me_, smiling right next to my healthy face. Otherwise he wouldn’t have left you in such a huff when he did.”

“Ah.”

Elias rubs his throat again, eyes closed now. Posture relaxing as he heals.

“… And then, without Martin to act as your reason, you took me back to the one place you knew an Archivist would belong. My confusion confirmed what you had been afraid of; the Web had made me unfit for your purposes, but, somehow, I was still technically your Archivist. Well, what does Elias Bouchard do when he has a problem of flesh and bone? Obviously you knew that John had stashed that pipe away in case he was ever attacked in the office, so you just did what you do best. You removed an annoyance through any means necessary.”

John smiles and takes a long, long drag. The cigarette is nearing its end.

“You didn’t know that you were dancing all the assigned steps. How could you? You just bashed poor little John’s head in without a second thought, completely forgetting that you weren’t alone. Forgetting that sound carries well down here. You also couldn’t know that a marriage of Web and Eye requires a sacrifice. John’s broken skull became somewhat of a honeymoon home, if you’ll excuse the expression. And I, both of me, moved in.”

He crushes his smoke against the coffee table. Elias still has his eyes closed.

“Back to the question of what I am, Elias, that is it. I am the final link in a long, long chain. Without the parts of me that is Archivist, this place falls apart. With the parts of me that are John, your ritual cannot be completed. We will keep serving, and we will stop the others, but the parts of _you_ that hoped to finally break free of the Web for long enough to complete the Watcher’s Crown have been killed. I don’t think an avatar of anything else could ever _core themselves _as thoroughly as I did, so this is the last step. And the first. We will serve doubly. That is all there is to it.”

Daisy feels sluggish with information, but Basira is practically vibrating.

So that’s it, then. A god of manipulation enslaving a god of knowledge to use it against the other gods. How… Honestly, how disinteresting. As Daisy sees all of this, nothing has really changed. Just an asshole boss being exchanged for a similar asshole boss, and all of them still have to do their jobs or die, and John is still an untrustworthy monster who saved her life once, and Martin is still gone, and Basira is still there.

“None of this matters,” she mumbles, surprised at how loud she sounds in the silence.

Elias looks shocked, but John smiles. She does not find his eyes as unsettling and she thought she would.

“No, not for you. Except that I will be coming back to work, and… I owe you. Both of you. Can you remember what a hotel feels like, Daisy? A good one?”

Daisy sinks against Basira and pretends like the rough fabric of her jacket is a cotton duvet. Basira blinks hard, but then her eyes fade a little, and she leans in as well.

“I think you two should take a couple of days off. Whatever powers are out there can wait for a weekend, no? Trust me, you will be safe.”

Daisy does not know why she gets up and shuffles out. She certainly doesn’t know why Basira follows her. Still… If John swears they will be safe, and if John is going to take over the archives, then what does it matter? Being manipulated isn’t so bad if you’re being manipulated right into a nice hotel.

For now, though, they return to the cots. The room is still cold so they huddle under the covers together. Daisy goes to sleep. She does not know what Basira does.

* * *

“So, this is the end of the deal.”

“Oh, yes. I don’t think they are going to bother you. Sorry about your face.”

“Very funny.”

“I wasn’t joking. Cheer up, Elias! The Institute is yours again, and no one here hates you anymore. Won’t it be nice to go back to how things were? Being completely in control of all your little pawns…”

“You don’t need to placate me, John. I’m not in control.”

“… No, you’re not. But you can pretend. I don’t think the Mother is going to interfere with your plans.”

“Unless I attempt a ritual.”

“Unless, as you say, you do something stupid.”

“Martin is still a loose end.”

“He won’t be for long. He’ll come see me when he’s ready.”

“And Lukas?”

“Will be dealt with. Can’t have anyone bringing about an extinction event in our archives, now can we? He must realize his presence isn’t wanted, and when he does, he’ll vanish like he always does. Easy.”

“… This is really it, then. Years of preparation. Wasted.”

“Years of preparation _come to fruition_, Elias. You will see.”

_Click._


	9. Epilogue: loose strings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaaand it's done! i have no idea how to feel! my first "long" fic to actually be complete!
> 
> thanks to anyone who has commented, left kudos or just read this thing. im kiss you on the teeth (unless you dont want me to, in which case i will just send you good vibes from a distance)

_Click._

“Oh.”

“Suppose that means he’s on his way.”

“You could have warned me.”

“I could have, yes, but sorting through the administrative mess you left me with has sapped what little good will I had left.”

“You don’t have to be sour about it. Any last advice?”

“… Don’t look him in the eyes. Though, if I’m being honest, Peter, I think your best course of action would be to leave before he arrives.”

“Hmm… No, I don’t think I will. I look forward to hearing what his plans are with this place, now that he owns it.”

“He does not _own_-“ _Click._

_Click._

“There it is again.”

“What’s taking him so long?”

“Looks like he stopped to talk to Rosie, but he’s back on his way, now. He’ll be here in just under two minutes. There’s still time…”

“I’m not leaving, Elias.”

“And why is that? Aside from your childish need to see me fail, Peter, what is really keeping you here? And I want you to _think_ about it.”

“If you’re implying I’m being played by the Web, save it. I’m perfectly capable of-“

“Fine. Do what you think you want. I’ll even lend you my office for the occasion, to save whatever scraps of dignity you have left. I’m leaving.”

“_My _scraps of dignity? That’s rich.”

Footsteps. A door creaking. When Elias speaks again, his voice is chilling and cheerful.

“There you are, John. To what do I owe this pleasure?”

_Click._

Thirty minutes later, Peter Lukas exits his former office to see Elias Bouchard on the couch. He is shockingly corporeal. In fact, Elias can’t remember ever seeing him so solid and colourful, with the usual grey tint of his skin replaced by a semi-feverish blush.  
His irises are vibrating under his blonde eyelashes.

Peter raises a hand when he walks past, like a physical barrier will somehow take the attention off him. Elias smirks and speaks to him anyway.

“Did you have a good chat?”

“Don’t.”

“… or was it mostly you doing the talking?”

“_Don’t.”_

“You don’t need to be sour about it, Peter. Having someone _know you _can be difficult.”

“You said he was serving the Web.”

“Oh, he is. I know this is a difficult concept for your family to grasp, but it is possible to be embraced by more than one entity. What, did it surprise you? Not used to talking about yourself?”

“I’m leaving.”

“Leave, then.”

Peter stands in the same spot, still made of flesh. His shaking sight and flushed cheeks seem to anchor him for the time being.

“Do you need a ride home, Peter?”

“Are you going to shut up during it?”

“No promises. You could always stay here until you recover. Personally, I find the sensation of the Watcher rather _comforting_.”

“… Fine. Take me to the docks.”

* * *

Martin Blackwood returns to the world with a feeling that he missed all the action. Sure, he did it on purpose, but still. Feels a bit weird.

John understands the feeling. He lets Martin come back on his own terms, in his own time; by the time he is completely corporeal, John has had the office cleaned. The multiple recordings of his ascendance are waiting on Martin’s desk, to be listened to in bits and pieces until he has the whole story. He disappears again, after that.  
He comes back. He always comes back.

When John knows that the time is right, he finds Martin on the tiny balcony hanging off from Elias’ office. It’s a rickety little structure left over from when the Institute was a residential building and, as such, the door leading out to it has been removed and walled over, but Martin gets out there somehow. John follows him, also somehow.

He stands next to the towering figure and watches the streets with him.

It snowed this morning and started raining around lunch, so now everything is just slush and ice and grey-specked white on the dirty sidewalks. John is watching, but Martin is… Well, Martin is too distant to really see anything. He makes a noise of recognition when John stands next to him and nothing more.  
Martin is still a person, though. All people have strings. John is getting excellent at braiding those strings.

“I wanted to thank you,” he says. His voice is low, almost ashamed. Martin lets out a choked kind of sound which turns into a flat, mirthless laugh.

“I don’t accept. You’re not gonna _thank me _for- for bringing you back here, John.” _if you're still John._

“No, not that.”

It finally makes Martin look at him and, for the first time, his single pair of blue eyes meets John’s doubles. John keeps talking.

“I… I’m not- I’m not _great _at this, Martin. Kind of hopeless, actually. With feelings.”

“What, you can’t just _know _what to say? I thought feelings was the Web’s whole deal.”

“I think I can, but I don’t want to. Not to you. Besides, I’m not actually the Web. I’m just serving it.” And as if to underline the fact, John pops his cigarette case out of his pocket.

It’s the right string to pull, and Martin lets out a very deep sigh.

“Fine. Just… Thank me, or whatever. For what?”

“Well, that’s the thing- I guess I should have been thanking you ages ago, but, you know… Hopeless, and everything. When you- I mean, when we met in the Lonely, I kind of… Remembered you? I didn’t remember much at the time but when I saw you, when- when-“

His slender fingers shake a little when he lights the smoke, but they calm down with the first drag.

“I remembered when we first met, and how… Well, I was an asshole, is what I’m getting at.”

Martin laughs that same, flat laugh, but there’s something painful on his face now. John knows he’s been waiting for these words for a long time, and this wasn’t how he wanted them. Still, John persists.

“You’ve been doing a lot from day one. I don’t think any of us would have survived Prentiss without you, and everything that followed, and I just… I never really thanked you. Not even for the little things, like the tea and the company and… and stuff. God, I’m sorry. It's... You've _been _here. You've been here all along. Frankly, I think you being here is the reason I am still here. What- what I’m getting at is… You, uh.”

He sends a plume of smoke into the cold air. It obscures the world ahead of him and, for a second, him and Martin are the only people there.

“You’re… You’re good, Martin Blackwood. And I’m sorry it took a couple of near-death experiences for me to tell you that.”

“… and a couple of actual-death experiences.”

“Yeah. That too. I’m a bit dense, aren’t I?”

Martin’s strings shake with new laughter, and he doesn’t even try to conceal the pain this time. They twist and turn and pull and braid, until they form a solid rope snaking around his neck, and even though John’s hands are still occupied with the cigarette and the railing, he is holding that rope.

“You’re more than a _bit dense, _John. You’re blind. But… Yeah, I guess I accept. The thanks and the apology. I mean, it’s kinda late now, isn’t it?”

John nods solemnly.

“It is, but… I think this whole thing has given me a new perspective, if nothing else. I don’t want to die again without having said anything.”

“Well, you’ve said something. Can I have a smoke?”

John’s eyes widen with surprise, but he still clicks the case open and offers a cigarette to Martin, who takes it with a clearly unpractised motion. He pinches the filter between his thumb and forefinger.

“You’re supposed to hold it like this, or you look like a stoner.”

“I know that.” Martin shifts his grip. John lights it for him.

“Didn’t know you smoked.”

“Well, I clearly don’t, but- the way I see it, we’re kind of under new management. The Web likes this stuff, so I figured I’d better… Uh, it does, right? It likes smoking?”

“I think it just likes addiction in general. There’s also something about predictable habits.”

“Yeah, yeah. Well, I’d rather pick my own vice, is what I’m getting at. It’s probably going to assign something to me sooner or later and I’m just going to get ahead of it.”

“… Well, it’s not the worst thing to pick up, if you disregard the smell and lung damage. A good way to get out of parties.”

Martin regards the cigarette like a sleeping snake before putting it to his lips, breathes, and almost immediately starts hacking.

“Fuck,” Martin wheezes, “that’s _vile_.”

“You get used to it.”

“Ugh, I don’t think I want to! And the smell!”

“Yeah, you get used to the smell, too.”

“… Fuck.”

He takes another drag, just pulling it into his mouth instead of his lungs this time. It goes a lot smoother. Then they stand in silence for a while, looking at nothing, submerged in the obscurity of smoke, until some kind of warmth settles in the inches between their shoulders, familiar now. Good, in a way. John can feel Martin gathering courage to ask what he’s wanted to ask for over a year, and he lets him. The time will be right when it is.

“John, are you still… You?”

John squashes his smoke against the metal rail and thinks.

“… I think so. I mean, I’m not the John I was three years ago, if that’s what you mean, but- well, you’re not the Martin you were three years ago, either. It’s kind of funny; I spent so much time trying not to change that it changed me.”

“I don’t think it’s funny,” but Martin smiles anyway.

“I am… Well, I’m not the John that took the archivist position. And I’m not the John that went into the Unknowing with explosives. I’m not the John that woke up from that coma and I’m not the John that barged into your office, desperate for you to tell me not to blind myself. But… But, is that bad? Because after-“ he shakes his hand at the world, “-after all of this, and learning how to walk and talk again, and just- learning how I’m supposed to _live_, it all feels…”

“Natural?” Martin suggests, voice no more than a whisper.

“Yes. Do you feel that way, too?”

It’s Martin’s turn to smoke to buy time.

“… I mean, I guess I do? Changing and adapting is kind of what humans are supposed to do. And I’m starting to think that struggling to stay human is kind of ruining that. I wouldn’t give myself to the _Web_, but, but I- I guess I see how you would?”

“And I guess I see how you would get into the Lonely. It’s not about closing your eyes and pretending like everything is normal. It’s about making the best of a bad situation.”

“Yeah, I guess. And that’s what we’re doing now, isn’t it? Rolling with the punches? Just... Trying to survive?”

“Mhm.”

Martin is corporeal enough now that John can touch him, and he does. His fingers are ghostly light on Martin’s elbow but Martin acts like it weighs a ton, first flinching, and then leaning into it. John’s hand trails from the elbow and down to the wrist, where they lightly, just barely, curl around it.

Martin has grown cold with his powers, but there is warmth by his arteries.

“What does this mean?” Martin asks, and it’s hard to tell if his voice is choked with tears or smoke.

“Something new?” John suggests.

Martin Blackwood, with all the strings that make up his large body, deflates with the promise of it. He does not know that he is being manipulated. If he had known, he would not have cared. He has grown good at not caring.

And maybe, just maybe, he deserves the comfort.


End file.
